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ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



MENTAL THEEAPEUTICS. 



BY 



W. F. EVANS, 

Author of " Divine Law of Cure " and 
" Primitive Mind-Cure." 



We speak wisdom among the perfect : yet a wisdom not of this age, nor of 

the rulers of this age, which are coming to nought." 
I —I Cor. ii:6. 



^-W, 




BOSTON : 

H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, PUBLISHERS, 
3 Beacon Street. 

1886. 






1/ 



Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1886, by 

W. F. EVANS, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



J. S. Gushing & Co., Printers, Boston. 



PKEFAOE. 



This volume is designed to complete a series of works on 
the subject of Mental Therapeutics, the publication of which 
was commenced several years ago, and which was intended 
to give a view of the subject in its various aspects. It is 
hoped the book ma}- be found acceptable and useful to those 
who are interested in the subject of which it treats. It 
contains a series of twelve lessons or lectures, which the 
author has given in a private way to a number of persons 
who were desirous of learning something of the philosophy 
and practice of the phrenopathic method of cure. In order 
that the information contained in the lectures might become 
more generally circulated, and meet the demands for instruc- 
tion that are made upon the author, they are committed to 
the press. There is given in the brief compass of the 
volume a plain presentation of the principles that underlie 
the practice of the mental system of healing, so that any 
person of ordinary intelligence, who is moved by a desire to 
do good, may make a trial of those directions. The author 
has endeavored to present to the reader every principle 
which may be viewed as scientifically and experimen- 
tally established, and that is of any practical value, 
and which it may be proper openly to promulgate to the 
world at large in the present state of the mind of man. 



4 PREFACE. 

Much of the teaching contained in the book has long been 
occult, and has been withheld from the multitude. In the 
active enquiring state of the mind of man in the present age, 
the domains of what is called esoteric science have been 
invaded, and well-nigh conquered. The system of mental 
science and phrenopathic practice taught in this volume is 
believed to be identical with the philosophy of the New 
Testament and with primitive Christianity, not meaning by 
that term the popular theology. The well of salvation, or 
system of healing truth, uncovered by Jesus, has not and 
cannot be drawn dry, but still springs up into and from 
everlasting life.) The difficulty with the world has been the 
well is deep, and our modern materialistic science has 
nothing with which to draw up the living water from its 
obscure depths. The disclosure of the leading doctrines of 
the spiritual science of antiquity, and the tenets of the 
ancient mystic brotherhoods, together with the rediscovery 
of the science of the correspondence of the natural and 
spiritual worlds, has given us the key that unlocks the 
deeper mysteries of Christianity. To the sincere and 
unselfish enquirer after truth is given to know the mysteries 
of the kingdom of the heavens, that hidden wisdom which 
was, and still is, concealed from the sensuous multitude, and 
revealed only to the "perfect" or fully instructed mind. 
Christianity, like the profound spiritual philosophy of all the 
Oriental nations, is a revelation to the celestial degree of 
man's mind, and when that higher region of our triune nature is 
unevolved into consciousness, and remains latent, its diviner 
light is concealed from view by the clouds of sense, " and upon 
the glory there is a defence " or protecting canopy. (Isa. iv : 5.) 



PREFACE. O 

The best way to learn the principles of mental healing 
and the profound spiritual science on which the phreno- 
pathic practice is based, is to commence the unfolding of 
our spiritual and deific powers, under the guidance and 
oversight of some one who has gone over the winding and 
spiral path leading up to mouutain summits and celestial 
altitudes of experience. The collection of traditional opin- 
ions that goes under the name of Christian doctrine, on the 
gradual development of the intuition, or the intellect of 
the spirit in man, will give place to the Gnosis, or absolute 
interior knowledge and certitude of truth which was denomi- 
nated faith by Plato, and Jesus, and Paul. By this supreme 
intelligence only can men be saved in the full sense of the 
word, and redeemed from sin and disease. This highest 
knowledge cannot be taught as our children learn arithmetic 
and the various external sciences, but must be drawn out 
from the concealed depths of our inner nature. To aid the 
student of Christian Theosophy to explore the inner realm 
of truth into which his own spirit opens, is the object of 
this volume. If it subserves that use in any one of its 
readers, it will not have been written wholly in vain. Like 
the preceding volume of the series, it has been written in 
the interest of self-healing, and to aid the patient, or suf- 
ferer from disease, to climb up from that misbelief and error 
of the understanding, where disease alone can exist, to that 
higher range of thought and clearer atmosphere of truth 
where its existence is impossible. Nothing will afford the 
writer greater pleasure and satisfaction than to learn of 
cases where it has been thus useful. A large number of 



6 PREFACE. 

letters have been received from every part of the country, 
and some from Europe, from invalids who have carefully 
read and studied the two preceding volumes of the author, 
gratefully confessing the benefit received from them. This 
has been felt to be an ample compensation for the time and 
labor expended in their preparation. The system of mental 
healing which is coming into such prominence and attracting 
so much attention in the world, has arisen, we sincerely 
believe, in the order of Providence or that intelligent Life 
which governs the world, and means a higher development, 
in the near future, of the inner nature of man. It is pro- 
phetic of the termination of the reign of matter and sense, 
and the re-establishment of the dominion of the spirit. As 
was said at the opening of the first dispensation of Chris- 
tianity, so in this age of the second coming of the Christ in 
the revelation of the glory and power of spiritual truth, we 
can say, " the kingdom of the heavens is at hand." 

The fundamental principle of the phrenopathic method of 
cure is the law of mental sympathy, not using the word in 
its popular and superficial sense of pity for the afflicted, but 
in a wider signification to express the influence of our minds 
upon other minds. Under certain conditions, and in a state 
of intercommunion of mind with mind, the thoughts, the 
ideas, the feelings, and all the operations of one mind are 
transmissible to other minds, and may be reproduced in 
them without the intervention of the ordinary channels of 
sensuous communication, but solely through the operation 
of what we may be allowed to call mental induction — 
borrowing the term from the science of electricitv — or the 



PREFACE. 7 

diffusive tendency of all mental states. All communication 
of mind with mind takes place, in fact, in harmony with this 
law, even when it is effected through written signs or 
spoken words ; for unless the two minds come into the 
same or like states of thought and feeling, they do not 
understand each other. To fully comprehend what another 
speaks or writes to us, his mental state, in other words, his 
ideas and feelings must to some extent be reproduced in us. 
This law of sympathy seems to extend through the whole 
domain of nature ; and on it, according to Proclus, was 
based the system of magic, or the ancient occult science. 
Through the operation of the law of electrical sympathy 
or induction, it has recently been proved by experim 
that a small battery in a railroad car, running at 
of thirty miles an hour, may transmit from the to 
moving car an electric influence to the main wire i 
tauce of several hundred feet, and a message can thus be 
sent. It has also been proved that two ships on the ocean 
at a distance of twenty-five miles apart, may thus communi- 
cate with each other, and send and receive messages 
through the operation of the same principle. But in the 
realm of mind, the law of sympathy or induction has a 
still higher and wider range of action. In the world of 
spirit, its influence is as extended as is that of gravitation 
in the material universe, and in fact, the latter is but the 
physical expression of the former. As all life is a mani- 
festation of the one Life, the individual spiritual state 
affects the whole, but in a greater degree those who are 
in immediate connection with us. All communication of 



8 PREFACE, 

mind with mind, as was said above, whether it be in this 

world or what we call the next, takes place in harmony 

with it. The phrenopathic system recognizes this law of 

mind, and turns it to a practical account. It simply 

utilizes a principle that has long been known, and aims to 

discover the laws of its operation, so as to intensify its 

action in the cure of mental and bodily disease. We have 

aimed, so far as possible, to divest it of all mystery, and 

make it like Christianity, an open wisdom for all humanity. 

The system demands only of its practitioners that, like the 

ancient spiritual priesthoods, they possess a sound mental, 

moral, and physical condition. 

East Salisbury, Mass. 
March 7, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



-♦- 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Receptive Side of Human Nature, and the True Method of 

acquiring Spiritual Knowledge, 11 



CHAPTER II. 
Trust as a Saving or Healing Power, 22 

CHAPTER III. 
What is the Eundamental Idea of Disease ? And What is it to 

heal Disease in Ourselves or Others 1 35 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Unchanging I AM in us, or the Divine and True Idea of 

Man, 46 



CHAPTER V. 
Is Disease a Reality or an Illusion 1 56 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Fall and the Redemption, or the Fundamental Evil in 

Human Nature, and the Remedy, 6Q 



10 CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE 

The Glorification of our Humanity, or Eull Salvation from Sin 

and Disease, 78 



CHAPTER VIII. 
The Breath of God in Man, or the True Elixir of Life, ... 91 

CHAPTER IX. 
Pain and its Mental Conquest, 107 

CHAPTER X. 

The Influence of Mind on Mind, or the Doctrine of Mental 

Spheres and its Practical Application to the Cure of Disease, 120 

CHAPTER XI. 
Phrenopathy, or Mental Cure, as a Practical System, . . . 136 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Keys of the Kingdom of the Heavens, or the Power to de- 
liver Ourselves and Others from the Bondage of the Senses, . 158 



ESOTEEIC CHEISTIANITT AND 
MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE RECEPTIVE SIDE OF HUMAN NATURE AND THE TRUE 
METHOD OF ACQUIRING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

The human mind is dual. There is an active, intellectual 
department of our being, and a passive and receptive 
nature, and the union of the two constitute the mind. The 
one is masculine ; the other, feminine. This bipartite divi- 
sion extends down through the three discrete degrees of the 
mind, and even into the body. The function of the oue is 
to act ; of the other, to receive and to react. When we 
turn the receptive and passive intellect towards the realm of 
light, the " intelligible world," the light of truth will flow in 
according to our degree of receptivity. In this way, the 
Hermetic philosophers of all ages and countries claimed to 
be able to learn all that is known or ever was known ; for it 
all exists in the world of ideas and in the universal Christ, 
and the Christ within us is in vital communication with it. 
This turning the receptive side of our mental nature towards 
the world of light is, in reality, the highest and most 
effectual form of prayer. The passive soul, with voiceless 
longing and in tranquil waiting, stands in silence as flowers 
turn toward the sun to receive its vivifying light and heat. 
A desire of spiritual knowledge for the sake of some benefi- 



12 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

cent use constitutes an affinitive attraction for it as certainly 
as a fading flower attracts the dew of heaven. The mother 
side of the soul, or the feminine element in man and woman, 
which is a finite limitation of a universal, formless, receptive 
principle, is the receptacle and continent of all ideas, and 
from the world of ideas knowledge may flow into it. Thus 
we acquire knowledge by absorption, as a dry substance in 
contact with water will imbibe that element and become 
saturated with it. 

Of the universal mother principle, which was one of the 
most occult doctrines of the Hermetists of all ages, Plato, 
in the Timceus, speaks as ' ' that nature which is the gen- 
eral receptacle of all bodies. For it never departs from its 
own proper power, but perpetually receives all things ; and 
never contracts any form in any respect similar to any one 
of the intromitted forms. It lies indeed in subjection to the 
forming power of every nature, being agitated and figured 
through the supernally intromitted forms, and through these 
it exhibits a different appearance at different times. Bat 
the forms which enter and depart from this receptacle are 
the imitations of perpetually true beings, and are figured by 
them in a manner wonderful and difficult to describe, as we 
shall afterwards relate. At present, however, it is neces- 
saiy to consider three sorts of things : one, that which is 
generated ; another, that in which it is generated ; and the 
third, that from which, the generated nature derives its 
similitude. But it is proper to assimilate (or compare) that 
which receives to a mother ; that from whence it receives, to 
a father ; and the nature situated between these, to an 
offspring." 

This receptive nature and absorptive principle is in eveiy 
one of us. But in receiving knowledge into itself, it must 
be prepared, or, as Plato says, " it is necessary that the re- 
ceptacle which is destined to receive all possible forms (or 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 13 

ideas) should itself be destitute of every form (that is, 
made, as it were, a vacuum). Just as those who are about 
to prepare sweet-smelling unguents, so dispose a certain 
humid matter, as the subject of the ensuing odor, that it 
may possess no peculiar smell of its own ; and as those who 
wish to impress certain figures in a soft and yielding sub- 
stance (as a wax tablet) are careful that it may not appear 
impressed with any previous figure, but render it as much as 
possible exquisitely smooth. In the same manner, it is nec- 
essary that the subject which is so often destined to receive 
in a beautiful manner, through the whole of itself, resem- 
blances of eternal beings (or ideas) should be naturally 
destitute of all that which it receives." It then becomes a 
formless universal recipient. (Works of Plato, translated 
by Thomas Taylor, pp. 487, 488.) 

Such is the recipient capacity of the soul. The person 
who has thus learned to imbibe knowledge from its inex- 
haustible fountain and repository is no longer like the man 
who has to carry his empty bucket to fill it from his neigh- 
bor's well, but has in himself a well of the living water of 
truth springing up into everlasting life. He has given up 
the vain and restless search abroad for what he can only 
find within. He has learned that heaven opens inward. 
Spiritual truth does not come to us from without ; but from 
the infinite inner depths of our own being which are in com- 
munication with the universal Christ, in whom are hid all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col. ii : 3.) 

There is one-half of our dual nature, the feminine moiety 
in man and woman, that is, in its absorptive capacity, 
a boundless and passive receptivity, which, when turned 
towards the ever-present realm of pure intellectual light, 
receives it into itself ; and the union gives birth in us to 
ideas which are flowers from the garden of God made up of 
celestial light and dew. 



14 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

All true education is a spiritual development. Spiritual 
knowledge is imparted, not by verbal discourse merely, but 
by the silent influence of mind upon mind. It is a principle 
that has always been recognized in the world, that one mind, 
by the influence of its silent sphere, can lift another mind to 
a higher intellectual level. This is a truth taught by Plato. 
Sokrates, in his dialogue with Theages (a w r ord which signi- 
fies Divine Guidance), tells this story of Aristides, in illus- 
tration of the silent communication of knowledge from one 
mind to another. "I will tell you, Sokrates," says Aristides, 
" a thing incredible, but nevertheless true. I made a great 
proficiency when I associated with you, even if I w r as only 
in the same house, though not in the same room ; but more 
so when I was in the same room ; and much more when I 
looked at you. But I made by far the greatest proficiency 
when I sat near }^ou and touched you." 

This has always been a method of instruction piactised by 
the Hindu adepts in teaching the neophyte the principles of 
their occult philosophy. The chela, or scholar, is subjected 
to the psychological influence of the guru, or teacher, who 
aims to impart to him knowledge through the Universal 
Mind. The disciple waits upon the master in a spirit of 
emptiness, and the intellectual sphere of the teacher's mind 
fills the vacuum. This is a method of education and of 
acquiring spiritual knowledge entirely unrecognized in our 
Western systems of instruction, but has long been known in 
the Orient, and was practised hy Jesus, and belongs to 
Christianity. The influence of the still living personality of 
Jesus, when we come into sympathetic (or psychometric) re- 
lations with him, is called the Paraclete, or spirit of truth, 
which was promised, to teach us all things and guide us into 
all truth. Jesus teaches more in this way than he ever did 
by verbal discourse. Jesus came into the world that we 
might have life, and have it in abundance. As some one 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 15 

htis said: "The Scriptures teach, and it is woven into the 
entire structure of the New Testament, that when Jesus 
Christ came, there was, through and by him, such a giving 
of life to souls as made all previous giving seem naught." 
He lays down his life for men ; in other words, he imparts 
his life, intellectual and moral, to us. He, as an incarnation 
of the universal Christ, came to be a quickening or vivifying 
spirit, in a degree that no one else ever was ; not as being 
the only one who is an example of the blending of the life of 
God with the life of man, but as depositing his own life in 
his disciples, and that life icas his life as he icas after the res- 
urrection and ascension. The religion of Jesus Christ stands 
apart from all other religions, and has as its characteristic 
and distino'uishins; feature that he can and does lodge him- 
self, and incorporate and repeat himself, in his true disciples ; 
so that they no longer live a mere natural life, but a super- 
natural life, a life so little their own that Paul could affirm 
in truth: "I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live ; 
yet not I, but the Christ liveth in me." (Gal. ii : 20.) 

Through Jesus we come into communication with the 
Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge. The best schooling we can get in the principles 
of esoteric Christianity is an hour's communion every day 
with Jesus. We may in this way not only imbibe the light 
of the higher world, but its life also. Through Jesus, as a 
mediating personage, we may come into a living communica- 
tion with the universal and only saving principle, which his 
name signifies and represents. Just as if we were in the 
foul, poisonous air of a dungeon, and a tube should be let 
down, communicating with the upper and purer air — the air 
of immensity. Through this we can breathe the breath of 
life, the pure ail of the boundless heavens. So in Jesus we 
have a communication with the Christ realm, and with the 
only saving, healing principle. 



1G ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

But Jesus is not a mere external and historic person, 
but an everywhere present saving principle, which, as being 
universal, or a one thing which is in all things, is in us. It 
is, in fact, the principle or faculty of Intuition, the passive 
and feminine intellect; and the development of this is the 
first step towards the attainment of spiritual life and knowl- 
edge. It is not good for the man in us to be alone. The 
rational intellect by itself is insufficient. Hence, God is 
represented as saying, I will make him a help, or a govern- 
ing or ruling principle (as the word may mean) meet for 
him, or, as more literally rendered, that answers to him. 

Intuition is the birth or evolution of the woman in man, 
that which is highest, and comes next to God. Its develop- 
ment in man is symbolized by the dove coming upon him. 
Of Jesus it is said, at the time of his entrance upon his 
Messianic work, at the age of thirty years (a mystic number) , 
that the heavens were opened unto him, and lie saw the 
Spirit of God descending and coming upon him in the 
form or quality of a dove, the Hermetic representative of 
the receptive feminine intellect, the Intuition. (Matt, iii : 1G, 
17.) It is man's highest guide to truth either in earth or 
heaven. It is the only faculty in man through which divine 
revelation comes, or ever has come. By means of it we gain 
access to an interior and permanent region of knowledge, 
where are stored up all the truths which were ever known or 
can be known, — the universal Christ, in whom are hid all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. By Swedenborg 
it was improperly called perception. By it we attain to 
righteousness or a divine rectitude of thought and certitude 
of truth. For it is the ineffable Word, the voice of God in 
man. The expression in the Old Testament, — 

" I said, Ye are gods, 
And all of you sons of the Most High," 

and which Jesus approves in its application to the spirit of 



AMD MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 17 

man, has a peculiar significance in this connection. It has ever 
been a doctrine of the esoteric philosophy and religion of all 
ages and nations, that each immortal spirit is a direct ema- 
nation from the "Unknown God," a personal limitation of 
the Universal Spirit, who is the father of all spirits, as the 
ocean is of all the drops that compose it. ( Each individual 
spirit is not God, but a god, and is possessed of all the 
attributes of its parent source, among which are omniscience 
and omnipotence. The spirit of man from its inseparable 
connection with God is possessed of a godlike wisdom, and 
has deific powers. As Paul has said, when his words are 
correctly rendered (as John Locke long ago showed) , '-With- 
out controversy, great is the mystery of godliness which has 
been manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by 
angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, 
and received up in glory." (1 Tim. iii : 1G.) 

In seeking for spiritual knowledge we are to look only 
within. "Man's true good," as Henry James remarks, 
"never comes from without him, but only from the depths 
of Divinity within him." The true orc/anon or method of 
acquiring transcendental truth, is that mode of the mind's 
action termed the intuition. Following this supreme light of 
the spirit, and turning the mind inward upon itself towards 
its divine centre, man comes into such relations with his own 
immortal Self, the animd divina, as to be able to receive 
from that source the knowledges of things that belong to 
the realm of pure intelligence, and of truths which the higher 
soul was supposed by Plato to have acquired before her in- 
carnation or descent into matter. By giving this prominence 
to the intuition, we would not imply any disparagement of 
the rational intellect, for it is only through this latter that 
the truths of the intuition can be reproduced and expressed 
in language. The intellect must be developed and culti- 
vated to the utmost, not as the instrument of discovering, 



o 



18 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

but of communicating truth. Perfecting and combining 
these two departments of our being, the rational intellect 
and the spirit, which is the union of the masculine and fem- 
inine in man, he attains to the highest knowledge which it 
is possible for the human mind in this world to reach ; for 
man thus knows God, and to know God is to have and to 
be God, and " the gift of God is eternal life." {The Vir- 
gin of the World, of Hermes Trismegistus, p. 15.) 

In the progress of our spiritual development we may reach 
a point where we need no external teacher, u for the anoint- 
ing that you have received abideth in you, and you have no 
need that any man teach you, for the anointing (or over- 
shadowing of the spirit) teacheth you concerning all things, 
for it is the spirit of truth itself." (1 John ii : 27.) The 
Universal Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are 
sons of God, and if sons, then heirs ; heirs of God and joint- 
heirs with the Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge. (Rom. viii : 1G, 17.) The spirit of 
man searches out all things ; yea, the deep things of God. 
It is the spring of all inspiration and revelation. (1 Cor. 
ii:9-lG.) As our individual spirit has a voice, so lias the 
Universal Spirit, in whom we are included. Let us turn the 
inward ear towards the "speaking silence" to receive the 
soundless word, " the deep and calm revealing." If with a 
sincere desire to know the truth, and live the truth, and use 
it for the good of mankind, and not from a mere idle curi- 
osity or for the sake of gain, we are found listening at the 
door of the temple of wisdom and the " halls of learning," 
the door will be unlocked and thrown open to us, and we 
may enter in and read the records of the hidden wisdom, 
which God appointed before the ages for our glorification. 
It is only in the deep silence of the soul that God speaks. 
Silence is the bosom of the Infinite Life, and contains the 
indelible record of all the truth that ever entered the mind 
of man. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 19 

" Silence is the heart of all tilings; sound the fluttering of its pulse, 
Which the fever and the spasm of the universe convulse. 
Every sound that breaks the silence only makes it more profound, 
Like a crash of deafening thunder in the sweet, blue stillness 

drowned ; 
Let thy soul walk softly in thee, as a saint in heaven unshod, 
For to be alone with silence, is to be alone with God." 

(Beyond the Sunrise, p. 80.) 

j It is not in the noise and bustle of the city with its tainted 
moral atmosphere, nor in the marts of trade with their sphere 
of falsehood and selfishness, that spiritual truth is best 
learned ; but rather in the solitude of mountain summits and 
the deep stillness of primeval forests, where we are alone 
with nature and with God. The prophets and sages of all 
nations have known and taught this. To gain the truth, 
they turned the receptive side of their dual nature towards 
the world of pure intelligence, and placed a listening ear 
close to the lips of the living, speaking silence to receive the 
inner word. Instruction from others may prepare the way 
for this, but can never be a substitute for it. All the deep- 
est experiences of the human mind tend to silence. There 
are desires that cannot be uttered (or worded). (Rom. 
viii : 26.) There is an ecstasy of love that seals the lips ; a 
rapt devotional frame that is dumb ; an inward craving for 
truth, and gravitation of the soul toward it, that can find 
no words to express it, but turns die soul toward God like 
the flower toward the sun. Says that little gem of a book. 
Light on the Path, "In time you will need no teacher. 
For as the individual has voice, so lias that in which the 
individual exists. Life itself has speech and is never silent. 
And its utterance is not, as you who are deaf may suppose, 
a cry : it is a song. Learn from it that you are a part of 
the harmony ; learn from it to obey the laws of the har- 
mony." "When the outward senses are conquered and their 
reign broken, and the inner senses are opened, as will be 



20 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

the case in time, we can wrest from all the objects of nature 
their hidden secrets.\ The world becomes a book on which 
is written the history of man. When the outer senses are 
subdued, and made subservient to the perceptions of the 
celestial man or mind, we may ask for the lessons of wisdom 
which the "inhabitants of Zion," the spirits of just men 
made perfect, or the spiritually enlightened of this world and 
the world above have to impart to us. For the truly regen- 
erate man is in hailing nearness to the celestial realms, and 
in sympathetic and receptive rapport with all enlightened 
mind in the world. But above all, let us turn the mind in- 
ward toward the secret place of the Most High, or the Divine 
Inmost, to receive the secret of the Lord which is given to 
them that reverentially adore him. (Ps. xxv:14.) The 
highest truths of religion and philosophy are received only 
by an inward revelation ; in other words, by intuition. The 
lesser mysteries may be communicated by instruction, which 
is only the interpretation of sacred symbols. The greater 
mysteries, or spiritual truths, can be received only by the 
"still small voice" within, which is the "Word of the 
Lord," the manifestation of the Logos, that came to the 
prophets, and still comes to men. The secret doctrines of 
the Jews, which are essentially the same as the "hidden 
wisdom" of the Hindus, the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans, 
were called the Kabala, which means reception, because they 
are truths received by an inward revelation, or unveiling, as 
the word means, of what is already in the inmost degree of 
the mind. It is an apocalypse, or uncovering, of the hidden 
treasures of man's inmost being. The Masora and the Tal- 
mud are only traditional instruction handed down from gen- 
eration to generation ; in other words, it is only public 
opinion, an uncertain and unsafe guide, and which, when 
crystallized into a permanent form, is called the law. The 
higher wisdom which comes only from the Christ within is 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 21 

called grace. In our search, for the hidden wisdom let us 
study the case of Elijah at Horeb, who represents to us the 
method of acquiring spiritual truth practised by the greater 
Hebrew prophets. When the great wind rent the mountain 
and broke the rocks in pieces before Elijah, he could not see 
God in the wind, nor in the earthquake which followed the 
wind, nor in the fire that followed the earthquake. These 
were only effects of the divine presence in nature. But after 
the fire tihere came a "still small voice"; and when the 
prophet heard that, he wrapped his face in his mantle and 
went to the mouth of the cave, and in " a speechless awe 
that dares not move," stood before the Lord to receive in 
silence the inner word. (1 Kings xix : 11-13.) It is only 
in this "sound of gentle stillness" that the Most High (or 
Divine Inmost) utters his voice in the soundless and ineffable 
Word, the inward Logos, the true light that lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world. 

" So to the calmly gathered thought 
The innermost of truth is taught." 

A true faith stands before Jehovah — who is represented 
on earth by Jesus — in the deep silence of an adoring love. 
and holds out its empty hand to receive the life and light he 
is more than willing to give. From within outward, and 
from the higher region of our mental nature to the lower, 
expresses the law and order of spiritual development. 

" Why idly seek from outward things 
The answer inward silence brings? 
Why stretch beyond our proper sphere 
And age for that which lies so near ? 
Why climb the far-off hills with pain 
A nearer view of heaven to gain? " 



22 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



e 



CHAPTER II. 

TRUST AS A SAVING OR HEALING POWER. 

It is said by Jesus, that " the Son (or the individual spirit 
and soul of man) can of himself do nothing, except what 
he seeth the Father doing." (John v:19, 20.) The uni- 
versal Christ principle, the first emanation from the "Un- 
known " is the supreme saving and healing power. It is the 
manifested God. In his (or its) relation to the Supreme 
Divine Essence, he is the first begotten and only begotten 
Son. In his relation to us and to all below him, he is the 
Father, for all manifested life is in him, and goes forth from 
him. Its characteristic property is an irrepressible tendency 
to impart itself, and like heat and light which symbolize" it in 
the world of nature, to radiate itself. In curing others, we 
can only execute the function of mediators between this 
universal principle and the diseased and unhappy ones to 
whom we minister. Through us, as a channel of communi- 
cation, it may come into them. We can do nothing better 
than this to heal the souls and bodies of men. An undeviating 
and trustful conformity to the operation of this principle in the 
world of nature and mind is the highest law of health. The 
individual and creaturely will must be surrendered to and be 
merged in the universal will. For the will is the principle of 
conjunction, and that by which we come into oneness with 
the Father. Two persons who will in opposite directions 
i are not and cannot be one. Willing in the same direction, 
they become, as it were, one life in two personalities. 

On the subject of trust, the Christian Hindu, Mozoomdar, 
very truly says: "Trust, as a facult} 7 of the soul, passes 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 23 

almost without recognition. Yet, in spiritual life, it is a 
cardinal, vital power. It is not a mere feeling. Though its 
relation to all warmth of sentiment be very deep, it is a 
positive organ of strength." {Oriental Christ, p. 141.) 
Blessed is the man who has risen from the life of sense, 
through the life of faith, to the life of trust. Trust is the 
opposite of fear, which is the fertile root of most diseases. 

It is a truth, and a great truth, that there is a divine saving 
principle, a universally diffused, and consequently ever acces- 
sible intelligent and loving Life, that exhibits an endeavor to 
impart itself and its saving blessedness to everything that 
breathes. This universal saving principle (or Divine Per- 
sonage, if we prefer thus to conceive it) lies beyond the 
apprehension of the senses, and consequently must be per- 
ceived and appropriated by faith, and taken up into our 
individual being by real prayer ; not the noisy supplications 
that clamorous lips pour forth, but a passive attitude of the 
mind. It comes to seek and save that which is lost, or to 
restore to man all that has dropped out of his existence and 
which is necessary to the realization of the divine idea in 
him. It is represented and signified by the name of Jesus. 
It is a principle (and in thought becomes limited in a person- 
ality) of pure spiritual intelligence, united to its correlative, 
pure love, which in conjunction constitute it a living sub- 
stance and force. If we will assume towards it, or him, an 
attitude of passive trust, it will save us. But how am I to 
do this? Suppose I desired and needed to warm myself by 
the light of the sun, how could I do so? The process is 
simple. I should expose nryself to the light and heat of the 
sun and let it warm me. I should make no effort to cause 
it to shine, but simply hold myself passively exposed to its 
vivifying rays. This is the only effort of will that is neces- 
.sary. If there was any obstruction, any opaque substance, 
between me and the sun, I should remove it. I should take 



24 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

away every screen which could obscure the sun's rays ; and 
then it would shine upon me and penetrate me with its living 
warmth, even without my asking or entreating it to do so, 
but by simply trusting it in silence. 

This universal saving principle is the same as the to ayaOoy 
of Plato, the supreme and eternal Goodness, the Christ of 
Paul, " a divine human principle " and person. As it is not 
only good, but goodness itself, it can do to and for us nothing 
contrary to its nature. We are to trust in it, as an infant 
reposes on the bosom of the maternal love. An infant's 
life is bound up in the life of the mother. So our true being 
is included in this principle represented by the name of 
Jesus. It has an affinity for all sinful and diseased 
humanit}'. It not only can be prevailed upon to save us, 
but it yearns to save. We need only to hold the soul 
passively open and upward to imbibe its life. 

In our efforts to cure others by the mental and spiritual 
method, we are to identify ourselves with it, and consecrate 
ourselves to its use, as an organ of communication between 
it and the patient. Even though we may not speak ourselves 
the word of life, we can be the silent telephonic wire, through 
which the vivifying inner word may be spoken to a patient. 

This only saving, healing principle in the universe is 
identical with the sun of the spiritual world, as described by 
Swedenborg, and which he defines as the proximate emana- 
tion from the " invisible God." It is the Kabalistic sun of 
righteousness (or spiritual truth) which arises in our souls 
with healing in its wings (or elevating power). (Malachi 
iv : 2.) Its light is the highest intelligence that can come to 
men, and its heat is a celestial love ; and the two in con- 
junction, and set over against each other in the mystic 
balance, make it pure life, a divinely vivific principle. 
(See my Divine Law of Cure, pp. 58-GO.) 

On the reception of this saving influence by assuming 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 25 

toward it an attitude of passive trust, I said in my Celestial 
Dawn, published twenty-three years ago. "Let us behold 
this great truth, this divine arcanum, or heavenly mystery, 
in an outward symbol addressed to sense. One of the 
greatest works of ancient Egypt, surpassing even the 
pyramids, was the Lake of Moeris, an artificial excavation 
four hundred and fifty miles in circumference, and three 
hundred feet in depth, and designed to receive the sacred 
waters of the Nile, to be used in fertilizing the surrounding 
lands. Between it and the river there was an obstructing 
barrier of earth, which was opened by a channel cut through 
it. Then the waters flowed of their own accord, and by a 
law of their nature, into the lake and filled it to its utmost 
capacity. Now the Nile — and the same is true of all rivers 
— mystically represented the Divinity, and was a symbol of 
an emanative principle and influence, a rema, as it is called 
in the Scriptures, a flowing forth from the Deity. In the 
Hindu religious symbolism rivers had the same significance 
and sacred character. The Lake of Mceris represents the 
human soul, made to be a recipient of the divine nature and 
life." So in esoteric Judaism, rivers were sacred symbols. 
Says the Psalmist, " There is a river (an emanative principle 
of pure intelligence and life) the streams whereof (or that 
go forth from it) shall make glad the city of God, the holy 
place of the tabernacles of the Mosc High." (Psalm xlvi : 4.) 
And this river, which represents and signifies the outflowing 
of the divine love and wisdom, is always full of the water of 
life (Psalm lxv : 9) ; and when every barrier is removed, and 
we hold the soul passively and unresistingly open to receive, 
it will flow in and fill the finite spirit with its illuminating 
and saving influx. 

Jesus, as we have before said, represents the only saving 
principle in the universe. This is a truth of which we should 
never lose sight. In the lower manifestation of this intelli- 



26 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

gent principle in nature, it does the best, whatsoever that 
may be, for the plant, the tree, the animal, and the man. 
But there is a higher exhibition of its operation in the realm 
of mind. Jesus, as an individualized expression of the uni- 
versal saving principle, and as an historic personage, was an 
ultimate manifestation of the principle of health, in the full 
sense of the term. He was perfectly well in soul and body, 
and a sympathetic conjunction with him brings us into rapport 
with the infinite fountain of health and well of salvation. 
But Jesus Christ comes in the flesh, or descends to an 
ultimate manifestation in us. He who believes this is born 
of God, that is, a divine life is engendered even in his bodily 
organism. I am not merely to believe in his coming to the 
world as an event of history (for that faith has only a trifling 
saving value and efficac}*) , but that he still comes in the flesh, 
and in my flesh. (2 John v:7.) His coming is not a 
movement through space, but signifies communication by 
influx. {Arcana Celestia, 5249.) By this coming of the 
Lord to us in the flesh, our external humanity is made divine. 
In treating a patient by the method of trust, we should 
approach him in the name of Jesus, that is, we should iden- 
tify ourselves with the saving' principle, which he represents, 
and through which he can be ever present with us, and in 
tranquil silence let him speak the Word, that saving inner 
Word, by which he healed, and still heals, the souls and bodies 
of men. The Divinity still speaks in man, as certainly as he 
ever did, but in our spiritual deafness and obtuseness, we 
mistake his voice in us, as did the youthful prophet Samuel. 
When the young neophyte came to the aged prophet Eli, un- 
der the mistake that it was a human voice that called him, 
he was sent back with instruction to listen to the inner 
Word, the sacred and soundless speech which God utters in 
the solitude and silence of our own spirit. ( The coming of 
the secret Logos, the inner voice, is the most important event 



AXD MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 27 

in our life. There are external books enough in the world, 
both sacred and profane, and of the making of them there is 
no end ; but no one of them, nor all of them condensed into 
one, is of so much value in our spiritual development as the 
inner Word. When this speaks, all other books and voices 
should be silent. In the language of Mrs. Browning : — 
" Hearken, hearken ! 
God speaketh in thy soul, 
Saying, thou that movest 
"With feeble steps across this earth of mine, 
To break beside the fount thy golden bowl 

And spill its purple wine — 
Look up to heaven and see how like a scroll 
My right hand hath thine immortality 
In an eternal grasping." 

This living Word is, as it is called in the New Testament, 
a rema, a flowing forth, an efflux or emanation from the 
manifested God, a divine proceeding and proceeding divine. 
It will come to every one who will assume toward it an atti- 
tude of listening and obedience expressed by the words, 
"Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." There is more 
saving virtue in it than in every remedy known to medical 
science. "He seat forth his Word and healed them." 
(Ps. cvii:20.) This Word is the divine Truth proceeding 
from the Lord. It was, and still is, made flesh and dwells 
iv ?)/uy, in us (not among us, as if it was something outside 
of us), and we behold its glory, a glory as of the only be- 
gotten of the Father, full of grace (or secret wisdom) and 
truth. (John i : 14.) This is not historic, but descriptive of 
what may be a present experience of the soul. We need to 
be raised out of the historical sense of the Scriptures into the 
living spiritual sense. The Bible (and the same is true of 
all sacred books) is not a history of events outside of our 
minds, like the books of Herodotus and Tacitus, but is a his- 
tory of eveiy soul, and of the universal soul. It is the in- 
side annals of man. 



28 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

The inward Word in us is a manifestation of the creative 
Logos or Word of the Lord by which the heavens were made. 
(Ps. xxxiii : 6. 2 Pet. iii : 5.) The visible universe is only 
the outward expression of the Logos, the externalization of 
the Word. So the inner Word in us seeks and endeavors to 
come in the flesh, or to manifest itself in a bodily organism 
in harmony with it. Matter is in itself not evil. In its 
reality and inmost essence it is divine — the second emana- 
tive principle from God. It is only when matter has domin- 
ion over spirit, that it is evil. It then usurps the place of 
God and is idolatry. Matter as it is in itself, and in its place, 
is an invisible, divine, and immortal substance. It is the cor- 
relative of spirit — a manifestation of spirit. What we call 
matter is not matter, but is unreal and an illusion. 

There is a tradition that Jesus was asked, "When the 
kingdom of God should come ? " and he answered, "When 
two become as one, and that which is without becomes as 
that which is within." This might seem at first sight to ex- 
press an impossibility, that two should become as one. Ac- 
cording to the Pythagorean symbolic numerals, one is spirit 
and two is matter. And the kingdom of God comes in us, 
and with saving power, when spirit and matter are no longer 
at war, but become one substance, and the phenomenal is 
absorbed into the real. The within, the spirit, is the invisi- 
ble Reality ; the without, the body, is the illusory Visible. 
{The Perfect Way, p. 327.) The apotheosis of matter, and 
the glorification of the body, is the highest triumph of faith. 
This was effected in Jesus, who has gone before us to prepare 
the way for us, and to open a pathway of light conducting bv 
an unerring straight line to the highest unfoldment of the 
divine element in man. His life was a life of trust that 
brought him into such close relations with the Godhead, and 
indissoluble union with the Father, as to raise his humanity 
entirely above the plane of sensuous illusion, and the evils 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 29 

that grow with more than tropical vigor in such a soil. Let 
us follow the path he has marked out for us. In the life of 
trust millions of souls have found rest, and this u so great 
cloud of witnesses" still speak to us in the language of Da- 
vid, in one of the most beautiful and expressive sacred 
hymns of any age or nation : "I had fainted unless I had 
believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the 
living. Wait on Jehovah : be of good courage, and he shall 
strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on Jehovah." (Ps. 
xxvii:13, 14.) 

By trust we rise above the delusion which is natural to 
the psychical man or mind, that our life is self-originated, in- 
stead of being perpetually derived from the Deity, and we 
come into union with the manifested God. Sundered from 
him, life and spiritual health would be as impossible as 
would the existence of the body without food and air. Man, 
as to his inner and true self, is but a part, a fraction, of a 
grand whole. Sundered from the whole, he is incomplete — ■ 
is as nothing. To unite man and God is the central design 
of Christianity and of all spiritual religions. The whole, the 
All, that from which all individual life springs, is the Christ, 
who is called also the Father, as being the parent source of 
all existences in earth and heaven. Jesus, as an incarnate 
expression and manifestation of the Christ, came from the 
supreme realm of spiritual being, and in him was focused the 
life of the whole. It was concentered in him, and through 
him we may come into communication with the whole. With- 
out this mediation and conjunction with the unbroken whole- 
ness of life, we are like a branch severed from the vine, 
which withers and dies. Conscious union with God is our 
natural condition, and consequently is health in the fullest 
sense of the word. Very truly does the author of that pro- 
found work, Natural Law in the Sjoi ritual World, say: "It 
is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to find its life in 



30 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY. 

God. This is its native air. God, as the all-surrounding, 
all-pervading life of the soul, has been the doctriue of all 
the deepest thinkers in religion. There is a profound saying 
of Paul, which defines the relation with almost scientific 
accuracy : ' Ye are complete in him.' In this is summed up 
the whole of the Bible anthropology — the completeness of 
man in God, his incompleteness apart from God." But in 
our fallen and bewildered state we are saying, in the lan- 
guage of Job : " O that I knew where I might find him, that 
I might come even unto his seat ! Behold, I go forward, 
but he is not there ; and backward, but I cannot perceive 
him : On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot 
behold him : he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cau- 
not see him." (Job xxiii : 3, 8, 9.) Yet he is as near to 
us as we are to ourselves, but cannot be discerned by sense. 
We never saw the air we breathe, and without which we 
cannot live on earth. Yet we are in it, and it pervades every 
part and tissue of our bodies, and its gases form a large 
proportion of Our corporeal structure. Separated from it 
we die. In a clear day, and beneath the blue dome of the 
heavens, a man need not institute a search to find the all- 
pervading atmosphere, for we are in it and are a part of it. 
Nor need we be constantly trying to breathe. If we cease 
our volitional effort at respiration, and our attempt to impel 
by the force of will the physiological machineiy, our breath- 
ing will not be suspended, nor will the vital movements come 
to a halt. We are so interwoven into the very texture of 
the Divine Existence that we cannot easily be unraveled. 
Much of our life is wasted in our futile endeavors to live in 
and from ourselves, apart from God. If we cease all volun- 
tary effort to breathe, the Divine Life of nature will breathe 
in us and for us, better than we do ourselves, and we need 
not exhaust all our energies in trying to breathe the breath 
of life. Neither do we need to make a constant effort to 
find God and live in him. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 31 

The Collective Man, the universal Divine Humanity, is the 
Christ, of whom Jesus is an incarnation. All men, as to 
their real huinanity, the essentially human principle in them, 
are included in the Christ, and are finite limitations of him. 
To view ourselves as isolated and disconnected fragments of 
this Divine Humanity — as disjecta membra, or scattered and 
disjointed limbs — is unnatural, and an error and illusion 
into -which the soul has fallen and from which it must be re- 
deemed. Jesus as the Christ, the second Adam, who repre- 
sents in himself the whole of humanity, came into the world 
for that very purpose. In him, as a manifestation of the all- 
inclusive Divine Humanity, and as the "Lord from heaven," 
every human being has salvation, in the New Testament 
sense of the word, if he only comes to the intuitive recogni- 
tion of it, and accepts it. If the Christ, as Paul affirms, is 
all and in all (Eph. i: 23), then my true life is his life, and 
will have no separate destiny, and may be safely and securely 
trusted to him. Underneath us are the everlasting arms. 

" How can I sink with such a prop 
As the eternal God, 
Who bears the earth's huge pillars up, 
And spreads the heavens abroad ? " 

Our immortal self is enclosed in the life of God. To edu- 
cate the world up to this grand conception was the errand of 
Jesus to mankind. The sphere of his life is in a perpetual 
conatus, or effort, to save the world from error and disease. 
He came into the world that the world through him might 
have life, in the completed sense of that word. He still lays 
down his life for men. From the exalted sphere of his be- 
ing, his influence, or the influx of light and life from him, is 
gradually dispersing the errors and delusions from the minds 
of men, which are the cause of our disorder and misery, as 
the fogs and mists of the earth slowly melt away when the 
sun is shining; above them. 



32 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

It is affirmed by Swedenborg that in our fallen state we 
can have communication with the life and light of the 
supreme heavens only by the mediation of celestial spirits 
and angels, who receive into themselves the life of the whole, 
and in conjoining themselves to us connect us with the whole. 
(Arcana Celestia, 5983.) Jesus is all this to us, and more. 
In him the lost link between the highest and lowest in the 
manifestation of life is restored. In him the perfect ideal, 
the archetypal man, has forever become the actual. The 
exhibition to the world of a perfect humanity in the life of 
Jesus has taught one lesson which our systems of theology 
have overlooked. It has demonstrated that sin and disease 
are no part of man. They are not constituents of human 
nature, for in Jesus we have a man perfectly pure, and with- 
out sin and disease. Hence these are no necessary part of 
human nature, but are an intrusion, an external accretion. 
To separate them from our essential self in our conception of 
ourselves, has a redeeming influence. They are to be viewed 
as something foreign to man. This is one great lesson that the 
incarnation has taught. The great error of the world is, that 
men believe that their sins, their errors, their maladies, are a 
part of their humanity. But in the perfect life of Jesus there 
is for all ages to come a sublime demonstration that it is not 
so. It is an object-lesson on a grand scale that can never 
again wholly fade from the religious consciousness. Jesus 
was externally and wholly what we are in the inmost and un- 
evolved degree of our being. By beholding him in this light, 
may we not be changed into the same image, and thus the 
disciple become as the master? The intuitive recognition of 
the truth, that sin and disease are no part of the immortal and 
real man, is the dawn of our redemption. It loosens the rivet 
in our chains, and they begin to fall off. In the life of Jesus 
on earth, brief as it was in a historical point of view, there 
was a projection of eternity into time, and of the infinite upon 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 33 

the plane of the finite, and the depositing of a new and higher 
life in humanity, the effects of which can never be lost to man. 
Somehow his life has become connected with the whole of 
humanity, and what God hath joined together, let not man 
by a false way of thinking put asunder. The character of 
Jesus in its freedom from sin and disease, in its spotless 
purit}- and healthfulness, exhibits the possibilities of our own 
human nature, and is the model idea, the exemplary concep- 
tion, we are to form of our own inner self. In Jesus the 
fraction of the Whole, the All, which we call the individual 
man, while remaining forever distinct like a drop of the dew 
of heaven forever crystalized, ceases to be a mere broken 
number, and returns to the unity whence it sprang. And he 
is drawing the world up to God after him. (John xii : 32.) 
If we are tired out with our vain struggle to save ourselves, 
let us deliver ourselves up to be saved by him, and by that 
universal- principle which his name represents. 

The fall of man, or his gradual descent from the light and 
blessedness of a spiritual existence, and the entrance of dis- 
ease and death into the world through sin, or the illusions of 
sense, is a great fact — a truth of history and of our inner 
consciousness. But the infinite love and life of God, and his 
redeeming and saving presence in the world of nature and of 
mind, is a still greater fact. We live in a world, the deepest 
reality and only supreme reality of which is spirit, the active 
presence of God, which is more than a match for sin and 
disease. Every man's own spirit, owing to its inseparable 
conjunction with the Universal Spirit, is to him the centre of 
the universe — the point where our life not merely touches 
the Divine Life as a tangent comes into proximity to a circle, 
but where it intersects and interblends with the life of God. 
By trusting this ever-present saving divine power, the healing 
process is accelerated in the individual man, and also in the 
collective race, of which we are a constituent element. God's 



34 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

love, which is an incessant impulse to give, to impart good 
and truth, is a stronger force than sin. The darkest night 
the world ever saw, and which may have seemed to hold the 
world in its irresistible embrace, has easily and without 
resistance yielded to the superior power of the dawning light. 
So as Paul has affirmed, " Where sin (or the illusions of 
sense) has abounded, grace (or the celestial wisdom) will 
abound more exceedingly : that as sin lias reigned unto death, 
even so will grace reign through righteousness (or spiritual 
illumination) unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our 
Lord." (Rom. v : 20, 21.) That from which we need to be 
redeemed is the unnatural bondage to the body and the illu- 
sions of the animal soul. Says an intelligent Brahmin, 
Vamadeva Shastiu, in a late number of the Fortnightly 
Review, "To escape from corporeal fetters, out of the end- 
less desert of ignorance and delusion, is the soul's supreme 
concern." And it is the simple lesson of trust taught in this 
chapter that there is but one power in the universe which 
can effect our liberation. This truth is well and forciblv 
expressed by the prophet Isaiah : "I, even I, am the Lord 
(Yava), and beside me there is no Savior," or health-giver. 
(Isa. xliii: 11.) We can neither save ourselves nor others. 
The only saving principle and healing energy is that which 
is signified and represented by the name of Jesus, and this 
as the supreme life of angels and men stands forever inclined 
to save. And the best thing we can possibly do is to let it 
save us. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 35 



CHAPTER III. 

WHAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF DISEASE? AND WHAT 
IS IT TO HEAL DISEASE IN OURSELVES OR OTHERS? 

\Ye lay it down as a fixed principle that there is nothing 
in the body that has not a prior existence in the mind or 
the soul. This truth is recognized by Swedenborg in his 
Science of Correspondence, which expresses the relation of 
material things to spiritual things. He says: "Then 
not anything in the mind, to which something in the body 
does not correspond ; and this which corresponds may be 
called the embodying of that." {True Christian Religion, 
375.) The condition of the body — and the same is true of 
all matter — is always an effect, of which something in the 
soul is the cause. There is not a motion, or action, or any 
conceivable condition of the corporeal organism, that is not 
due to some antecedent action or state of the mind, by which 
we mean always the principle of thought. 

In case of accidents, or chance occurrences, there is 
always the relation of cause and effect, for it is inconceiv- 
able that a thing should occur without a cause, and all causes 
are mental. Suppose a splinter is inserted in our flesh by 
what we call an accident, how it will be asked, was the mind 
the cause of that, since it occurred without our thinking of 
it? I answer, that we both thought and willed what led to it. 
The body did not place itself in the situation where alone 
such a wound could be received. If it was the result of an 
action, such as handling a rough piece of wood, the mind 
alone was the cause of that act, for surely the body did not 
move itself. Both the body and the splinter were passive. 



36 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

The only active cause was tbe mind. And the same is true 
of all disease. 

The essentially vital organs in the human body are the 
heart and the lungs, and these have an immediate corre- 
spondence with the mind. In fact, the fundamental corre- 
spondence between the mind and the body is seen in the 
correspondence of the heart to the love, or the emotional 
nature, and of the lungs to the understanding or intellect. 
The two departments of feeling and intellect constitute the 
whole mind, and all mental action is included in them. And 
every change of our feelings or emotions is instantaneously 
translated into a bodily expression by a change in the action 
of the heart, and consequently by a modification of the cir- 
culation of the blood. But this, if continued for an} r con- 
siderable length of time, must of necessity affect the vital 
condition of every organ and tissue of the bodily structure. 

The lungs in their action respond to the intellect, and their 
movement is always the exact representation of the state of 
the intellect. Respiration is the primary movement of the 
bod}*, and is that on which all other movements depend, and 
there is an importance attached to it, that few ever stop to 
consider. Whatever affects the respiration must influence 
every vital action. Respiration corresponds to the under- 
standing, consequently to the state of thought, and likewise 
to faith, because faith is a state of thought. Every change 
of thought effects a modification of the action of the lungs 
(as in the act of listening), consequently of the respiration, 
and this must of necessity affect all the physiological move- 
ments and functions. Hence, an act of faith inaugurates a 
change in the action of the lungs, which is communicated as 
an impulse in the direction of health to every part of the 
body. So, also, fear, and every abnormality of the mind, 
affect the action of the heart and lungs in the direction of 
disease, for the movements of the heart and the lungs are 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 37 

primary movements on which all others depend. Hence 
disease must be considered as the translation into a bodily 
expression of a prior inkarrnony of thought and feeling. 
All disease resolves itself into this in its last analysis. We 
shall not go far from the mark in our diagnosis of any 
malady when we pronounce it a case of the divergence of 
thought from a divine rectitude — a deflection of the mind 
from the real truth. 

Thought and feeling make the mind ; in other words, the 
What we are, and all that we are, is but the srather- 



man. 



ing up into a personal and human form of all that we have 
thought and felt. Thought and feeling are never in reality 
separated. Feeling is thought in its boundless and formless 
universality and indefiniteness. Like the original chaos, or 
primal cosmic matter, it is of itself waste and void. Thought 
is feeling defined and formulated and taking a particular 
direction. All feeling, whether it be a sensation or emotion, 
is of itself meaningless. Thought, as an activity of the 
intellect, gives it meaning and quality and form ; in a word, 
a local habitation and a name. On this philosophical prin- 
ciple, stated by Swedenborg, " that the wisdom (or intellect) 
is the form of the love or feeling," — and by form is meant 
not merely shape, but quality, — hang great practical conse- 
quences. A patient should be instructed that his feelings in 
and of themselves have no significance. It is only our way 
of thinking which makes them mean disease or health. On 
that pivot our destiny turns. 

Thought and existence are absolutely identical and in- 
separable. To think is to exist ; to exist is to think. As 
thought and existence are one and inseparable, it follows 
that any change in our waj* of thinking must, by a necessary 
law, modify our existence. Hence disease, which is an ab- 
normal mode of existence, in its radical significance, is a 
wrong way of thinking ; or, if you prefer to so call it, a mis- 



38 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

belief. The universal life principle, or ground of our exist- 
ence, is feeling. But being of itself and standing alone a 
pure indefiniteness, it is without form and void. It takes 
form, or, what means the same thing, qualit}-, from thought. 
Hence it is a principle as fixed as the eternal laws of the 
mathematics, that as I think, so I am. Thought shapes our 
whole existence, and, like the helm of the ship, determines 
our course on the ocean of life. 

Disease is a mental inharmony, disquietude, discomfort, 
dissatisfaction. It is, as the word means, a state of unrest. 
It is an unbalanced mental condition. To get a clear con- 
ception of this, it is necessary to remark that the mind of 
man is dual ; that is, each degree of our triune nature is 
made up of wisdom and love, or intellect and feeling. The 
inordinate predominance of either department over the other 
is inharmony ; that is, it is a loss of equilibrium. In nervous 
maladies — and these include a very large fraction of all 
chronic ailments — there is a great preponderance of the 
feelings over the intellect in the mental life of invalids. They 
are all feeling, and the intellect is dormant. This mental in- 
harmony expresses itself in -the body. Corresponding to the 
two departments of our mental nature, intellect and feeling, 
there are two kinds of cerebral substance, the cineritious and 
medullary, and two distinct classes of nerves, nerves of mo- 
tion and those of sensation. In disease, the nerves of sen- 
sation become morbidly acute, and the nerves of motion 
correspondingly w T eak, with a disinclination to motion. Of 
course, the cure must consist in the restoration of the lost 
balance. But the bodity condition is only the external ex- 
pression of the mental inharmony. Hence Swedenborgy in 
accordance with the law of correspondence, by which all out- 
ward things signify and represent internal things, or things 
of the mind, says that to cure signifies to restore the spiritual 
life of man ; because disease and sickness correspond to the 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 39 

state of man when he declines from the truth to the false, 
and from good to evil. (Arcana Celestia, 9031.) In an- 
other work he affirms that healing signifies reformation ; that 
is, re-formation by truth derived from good. (Apocalypse 
Explained, 284.) It is the forming anew of the inward man 
by the truths of faith. Goods and truths, or states of feel- 
ing and thought, are so real that the inward man is nothing 
but his own goods and truths, and which take on the human 
* form. (Arcana Celestia, 10,298.) The imparting spiritual 
truths to a patient, to take the place of his psychical or sen- 
sational illusions and fallacies, forms or re-forms the inward 
man in the image of the heavenly ; that is, of health and har- 
mony. The healing of disease is the creation, or generation, 
or evolution, of a new man, the spiritual man, the Sanscrit 
Manas. The psychical or unspiritual man or mind, with all 
his phantasies, must be dethroned, his empire of sin (or 
error of the understanding) must be subverted, and the 
dominion is to. be given to the new and higher man, the 
Christ within, who must reign until all enemies are put 
under his feet. As it is expressed by Paul, the Christian 
philosopher, we are to put away, as concerning our former 
mannerof life, the old man (formed by those appearances of 
truth which belong to the sensuous or animal range of the 
mind), and Which waxeth corrupt after the lusts or desires 
of deceit ; and we are to be renewed in the spirit of our 
mind, and put on the new man, which after God is created 
(by the truths of faith) in righteousness and the holiness of 
truth. (Eph. iv : 22-24.) In another place he enjoins upon 
us the putting off the old man (the sensuous mind, the ex- 
ternal shell of our true being) with his doings, and the put- 
ting on of the new man, which is renewed unto knowledge 
after the image of him that created him, and in which new 
man Christ is all, and in all." (Col. iii : 10, 11.) As the 
body is formed of the food we eat, the water we drink, and 



40 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

tlie air we breathe, so the Dew man in Christ is formed of 
the spiritual truths we imbibe. The material body thus 
made is mortal, and subject to constant change, to disease, 
and death ; but the new man is immortal, unchanging, and 
undying, and exempt from disease and unhappiness, by vir- 
tue of its inherent immortality. This is the cure of disease 
to some purpose, and health becomes identical with regener- 
ation. 

The fundamental idea of health is integrity or wholeness. 
And this completeness consists in the perfect balancing of 
the departments of intellect and feeling, or the masculine 
and feminine elements in human nature. So long as these 
are out of due proportion and stand unreconciled, they are 
the occasion of sorrow, suffering, want, and bondage. This 
condition is the parentage of evil. But when the}' are har- 
moniously blended, and act as one, they generate and bring- 
forth harmony and health. Perfected man is androgyne; 
that is, male and female in one personality. The union of 
the two in a harmonious synthesis is what is called, in the 
.Kabala, the house, as in this passage : " Through wisdom is 
an house builded ; and by understanding it is established." 
(Prov. xxiv:3. Idra Suta, sec. 312.) When these two 
elements are separated, or one is greatly in excess of the 
other, it is a state of inharmony, an unbalanced condition, 
and this is mental disease. Jesus refers to this when he 
says, "A house divided against itself shall not stand," — 
the two conflicting elements mutually destroy each other. 
This state of antagonism between the two component ele- 
ments of the mind was represented in the Kabala symboli- 
cally, by the union of the man and woman back to back ; 
that is, each looking in a direction opposite to the other, and 
this was evil. It is not good for man to be alone. For all 
of truth in us that is not united to its correlative good or 
emotion comes to nought. And all of good that is not con- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 41 

joined with truth has not in it the quality of permanency. 
This is expressed in the occult spiritual science of the Ka- 
bala thus: "The male is a mere half body; so also the 
female." (Idra Suta, sec. 718.) " Blessings descend not 
upon mutilated and defective things, but upon that which is 
complete — not upon half things." (Idra Suta, sec. 723.) 
"Half things neither subsist in eternity nor receive blessings 
for eternity." (Idra Suta, sec. 724.) This was an idea 
familiar to Paul, who says : " The woman is not without the 
man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord." (1 Cor. 
xi : 11, 12.) When the two departments of intellect and 
feeling are perfectly balanced, and there is, as Swedenborg 
would say, " the marriage of good and truth," it is a condi- 
tion of perfect mental equilibrium. Health, or wholeness, is 
represented by the balance, or scales of justice, in a state of 
equipoise. In all diseases there is a loss of balance. Usu- 
ally the feelings, either as emotion or sensation, are greatly 
in the preponderance, and this liyperwsthesia is always a 
state of weakness, and accompanied with a disinclination to 
motion. The principle here unfolded is one of great practi- 
cal importance in the treatment of disease by the mental 
method. 

Spirit and matter sustain to each other the relation of 
male and female ; that is, the one is active, the other passive 
or reactive. When they are joined back to back, to use a 
Kabalistic figure, or are looking and willing in opposite 
directions, it is a state of war and mental unrest. When 
thev are joined face to face, or look and will in the same 
direction, and consequently become a unity, it is a state of 
peace, harmony, and health. The opposition of the flesh to 
the reign of the spirit, this schism in human nature, the 
rending asunder of the higher and the lower degrees, and 
their coming into antagonism, is the fundamental idea in 
disease, which is first in the mind, and then by derivation in 



42 ESOTERIC -CHRISTIANITY 

the body. The flesh — the lower and animal soul with its 
senses and selfish propensities — warreth against the spirit, 
and the spirit agaiust the flesh. This is the fall of man, the 
lapse of the soul, and " the great unhingement of human 
nature." The spirit, the Kabalistic KeretJi, the Crown, has 
the right of dominion, and the union of the two regions of our 
being ; the reconciliation of the two warring extremes hy 
the submission of the lower to the higher, is the true concep- 
tion of the atonement, or at-one-ment. And this can only 
be effected by sacrifice, the offering up of the lower animal 
and selfish soul to the spirit. This was signified by the 
various offerings of the Jewish ritual, the offering of animals 
to God. This had only a symbolic value and efficacy, and 
signified the surrender of the anima bruta, the animal soul in 
man, to the anima divina, the divine soul or the spirit. 

The divergence of the creaturely will, or that of the ani- 
mal soul and its body, from the will of the celestial man, is 
the root of our mental and physical maladies. This is the 
condition of human nature everywhere, and of our human 
nature. This is what ails us in every disease. How we be- 
came so, and why, we need not now stop to ask. It is a 
fundamental fact in the spiritual science of disease. The 
restoring of this breach, the healing of this schism, the recon- 
ciliation of this contradiction, is the aim of Providence, and 
should be of medical philosoph}^. If the lower animal soul 
surrenders to the divine spirit in us, the battle is ended, and 
peace is declared through the whole mental and physiological 
domain. As Jesus said, "If any man will save his soul 
(or tenaciously adheres to the life of sense), he shall lose it. 
But if any man will lay down his soul for rny sake and the 
Gospel, he shall save it. (Luke ix : 24.) If this surrender 
is not made voluntarily and at once, it is effected by suffer- 
ing. This is the meaning of disease and pain. It is a sum- 
mons to the lower soul under a flao- of truce to surrender. 






AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 43 

Consequently, disease and suffering are not an evil, only as 
we think them such, but a good. What we call evil, as 
Fichte has said, is the best thing, and the only good thing 
for some, there is in life. In our inverted condition we call 
good evil, and evil, good. 

Emancipation of the inward and real man from a state of 
degrading bondage to the body and the senses is the uni- 
versal remedy for disease. It is not the province of the 
body to say what I shall be or do ; it is for me to say. It is 
said in that remarkable book, The Perfect Way: u It is ac- 
cording to the divine order of nature that the soul should 
control the body. For, as a manifested entity, man is a 
dual beiug, consisting of soul and body ; and of these in 
point of duration and function, and therefore in all respects 
of value, the precedence belongs to the (higher) soul. For 
the soul is the real, permanent individual, the self, the ever- 
lasting, the substantial Idea, of which the body is but the tem- 
porary residence and phenomenal expression. The soul, 
nevertheless, has, properly speaking, no will of her own, 
since she is feminine and negative. And she is, therefore, 
by her nature, bound to obey the will of some other than 
herself. This other can be only the spirit or the bod}' ; the 
Within and the Above, which is Divine, and is God ; or the 
Without and the Below, which, taken by itself, and reduced 
to its last expression, is the devil. It is, therefore, to the 
spirit and soul as one, that obedience is due. Hence, in 
making the body the seat of the will, the man revolts, not 
merely against the soul, but against God ; and the soul by 
participation does the same. Of such revolt the consequence 
is disease and misery of both soul and body." (The Per- 
fect ^Yay ; or, The Finding of Christ, p. 21G.) 

" But for this end is the Son of God — the spirit in man, 
the inward Christ — manifested, that he might destroy the 
works of the devil," or terminate the dominion of matter 



44 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

and sense, which are one and the same, as all the properties 
of matter are only sensations in ns. (1 John 3 : 8.) Matter 
is not in itself evil. It is only matter and sense as regnant, 
that is called the devil, the deceiver. It is the function of 
the spirit to break the reign of the senses and end their 
unnatural revolt. To rescue man from this unnatural domi- 
nation of the lower nature over the higher is the aim of the 
mental science of disease and the phrenopathic method of 
cure. In order to effect this, it endeavors to educate men to 
a higher conception of the dignity and divinity of human 
nature. The ideas of things are positive, spiritual entities, 
and belong to the spiritual heavens. Between all the phe- 
nomena and appearances of nature and their ideas, there is 
the relation of effects to their causes. The living ideas of 
things, which are apprehended only by faith, necessarily 
precede and control all the phenomena of nature, including 
the various changes in the bod} 7 of man. The ideas which 
we entertain of ourselves, take form first in the psychical 
body, and through this are ultimated and reflected in the 
physical body. The condition of the physical organism is 
only the echo, the reverberation, of our ruling ideas and fixed 
beliefs. If we would modify the outmost in man, the change 
must commence in the inmost. Hence the importance of 
being able to form the correct idea of ourselves and to think 
of ourselves rightly, as thought is the starting point of our 
existence. If we form an imperfect and distorted idea of 
ourselves, it will be reflected in the body as certainly, if not 
as quickly, as when a man distorts his countenance it will 
appear in the image of himself in the mirror before which he 
stands. We are commanded to think of ourselves soberly 
(that is, neither above nor below the true standard), as God 
hath dealt to each man a measure of faith. (Bom. 12 : 3.) 
Let us try, then, and take the true measurement of man as 
a spiritual and immortal being, that the outward body may 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 

be fitted to it as a garment of beauty Some one on being 
asked bow be supposed Jesus looked rephed, "A. he 
thought and felt." That was a comprehensive answer. It 
Jas Its application to all men, and expresses a profound law 
of human nature. .. , 

What is the divine idea of man? It is said and believed 
that God made man in his own image and hkeness and he 
m »st have thought of him after the pattern of bunself He 
has a higher idea of man than he is mclmed to form of b m 
self Man viewed as a material being and weighed m the 
scales of materialistic science, and even in the popular theo- 
logical balance, does not count for much, and is hardly worth 
Eg. In opposition to this imperfect view let us we.gh 
In tn the balance of the sanctuary, the divine standard 
and gain, if possible, the true idea of him. For this true 
idt will be as a sun. Its living influence will extend from 
he inmost in us to the outmost by an orderly progression 
and evolution. "The lamp or lantern of the body is he eye 
(by which is meant the intellect of the spirit). If; the eye 
ie sLle (that is, sincere, pure), the whole body is uc.d. 
If the eye be evil (or there is a wrong and false ulea) the 
whot bodv is darkened (or affected by the falsity and the 
evil) If, then, the luminous principle be darkness, how 
great is that darkness? " (Matt. 6 : 22, 23.) 



46 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE UNCHANGING I AM IN US, OR THE DIVINE AND TRUE 
IDEA OF MAN. 

The great question, "What must I do to be saved?" or 
healed, in the full sense of the word, is best answered by 
saying, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou art 
saved." (Acts xvi : 30, 31.) But the Lord, and the Jesus, 
and the Christ, are all in man as the centre of his being. 
They constitute the first triad, or first three of the ten Seph- 
iroth, or divine emanations, and are the realm of pure spirit, 
of which my spirit is a personal limitation. To believe on 
the Lord Jesus Christ as in me, is equivalent to the intuitive 
recognition of the truth, that I was never lost except to the 
consciousness of my lower soul. And thus the Christ within 
is exalted to be a Prince and a Savior to give repentance 
unto Israel (or a change of mind or thought, as the word in 
the original means) for the remission of sin, or the putting 
away of the errors of understanding. (Acts v : 31.) 

There is a region of nry conscious being that is not subject 
to change, and to those ever-varying appearances which 
characterize the existence of what we call matter, and con- 
sequently is not subject to disease or dissolution. I call up 
in my memory an event of my early childhood. Though my 
bod}' has wholly changed once a year ever since, and i have 
passed through a great many vicissitudes of fortune and 
condition externally, sickness and health, sorrow and joy, 
yet that which I call Ego, the I, the self, is the same I now 
that it was then. The inner I, the ever-identical Self, has 
persisted unchanged through all. My thoughts, my sensa- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 47 

tions, my feelings, desires, volitions, and my environment or 
surroundings, may have varied at every passing moment of 
my existence, but / have remained the same. This unchang- 
ing, undying, and identical self is my spirit, that which 
Jesus calls in himself the / am, and it is that alone which 
can soy of itself, I Am. lie who spake as never man spake, 
says, ;> I go to prepare a place for you ; and if I go and pre- 
pare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto 
myself, that where I Am, there ye may be also — not where I 
■was before my incarnation, nor where I shall be after my 
ascension, but where I Am." (John xiv : 1-3.) Again he 
says: "I will, therefore, that those whom thou hast given 
me, be with me where / Am, not where I was, or shall be, 
but in that spiritual state which ever predicates of itself, I 
Am." (John xvii:24.) From this region of his being, 
which knows no past or future, he affirms, " Before Abraham 
was, I Am." (John viii : 57-5'J.) Now it is evident that 
Jesus said this of himself as man. for he knew what was in 
man. (John ii : 25.) This inner unchanging Ego is to us a 
fact of consciousness the most certain of all truths ; for no 
man ever doubted, or can doubt, that his personal or indi- 
vidual identity has remained the same from infancy to age. 
But that in which our personal identity consists and perpetu- 
ally persists through all external changes and revolutions, 
and even successive incarnations, or renewals of the body, 
is not, and never was, diseased or lost. My sicknesses do 
not belong to one Ego, and my present state of health and 
blessedness to another. I am the same I, now and forever, 
and I Am not sick or unhappy. Of JeHus the Christ it is 
affirmed, that he is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
(£Ieb. xiii : 8.) It is the Christ within us, whose divine name 
is Ehejah, or I Am, that is the One and the Same. The Un- 
known, God comes to personal manifestation in the spirit of 
man. God taught this oreat lesson which belongs to the 



48 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

greater mysteries, to Moses. In the sacred books of the 
Persians, the Supreme, the Most High, gives to the seer who 
asks his name, the answer, Alimi, I Am ; and in another 
place, Ahmi yat Ahmi, I Am that I Am. This is an old 
truth. Everything which can predicate of itself, I am, is 
divine, and the highest expression of Divinity, and can never 
say of itself, I am sick or unhappy, for the Ehejah of the 
Kabala, the Ahmi of the Persians — which is our own inner 
and divine self — may always affirm of itself perfect health 
and blessedness in the present tense. 

If to cure disease is to restore the spiritual life of man, 
then everything which tends to accomplish that grand result 
must be considered as the best remedy. I know of nothing, 
and can conceive of nothing better adapted to this, than the 
formation in ourselves of the divine and true idea, both of 
ourselves and of the patient. One of the most marked 
effects of this method of cure is the development of the 
spiritual life of the patient, which has long been dormant. 
Under it we often witness a marked change in his freedom 
from the dominion of the senses, and the dawning in him of 
a more spiritual mode of thought and feeling. When a man 
gains a glimpse of the divine idea of his humanity, and intui- 
tively perceives that the self is immortal and undying, and is 
not and cannot be diseased, he feels an impulse in himself 
towards the externalization of that idea, or, as Paul would 
say, "to put on Christ." The Christ within, when discov- 
ered to the consciousness of the soul, seeks to clothe itself 
with a body that perfectly fits it. So when a person thinks 
that he is a king, he feels an irresistible impulse to act like 
a king. We may call him insane, but it is only a recogni- 
tion of what he really is. So as soon as we get the true idea 
of our real Self, the unchanging and undying I Am y and that 
the real man is not sick, we cannot avoid the consciousness 
of an impulse to act out the idea and play the part of health. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 40 

Whatever mode of thinking will cure me, will, when I think 
it of another, tend to cure that other. My first aim should he 
to become perfectly well and happy myself, not from a low, 
selfish consideration, but from a higher motive. For one of 
the essential conditions of our being able to cure others by 
the phrenopathic or spiritual method, is that we be ourselves 
in health and blessedness ; because our influence, that is, the 
inflowing of our minds upon and into another, must of neces- 
sity partake of the quality of our mental states, and our 
inner life. Jesus represented in himself the principle of 
health, mental and physical. Hence his presence and his 
touch communicated a sanative contagion. In proportion 
as we are like him, we can do the same. For a sick man to 
practise healing, is like a man on crutches showing the 
world how to walk and rim. 

When we form in our minds the true idea of a patient, 
snch as he really is in sjririt, if he is in any degree receptive, 
we inaugurate a change within him, which will sooner or 
later work itself outward into a bodily expression. We 
plant in his unconscious mind the spiritual germ, the living 
seed of a better condition. This will develop into con- 
sciousness in him. 

It is a doctrine older than Plato, and an intuitive cer- 
tainty, that nothing can have an objective existence, or be 
perceived in the sense-world, before the abstract ideal of 
that entity is called forth in the mind. Before the mechanic 
constructs his machine, as a watch or a steam engine, every 
part of it pre-exists in his mind, and the whole is but the 
externalization of his ideal. Every object in nature may 
be reduced to a sensation (which is a feeling) and an idea 
(which is of the intellect). Without either of these, it has 
to us no existence. But the idea has an existence prior to 
the sensatiou, and without the former the latter could not 
exist in our consciousness. Hence sensation always arises 



50 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

from within, however contrary this ma3 T be to the appear- 
ance and the general opinion of men. Professor Mailer 
lays down the general proposition, " That external agencies 
can give rise to no land of sensation which cannot be induced 
by internal causes exciting changes in the condition of the 
nerves. " The sensation of smell is sometimes experienced, 
usually by persons of an excitable, nervous temperament, 
without the presence of any odorous substance in f-ic air. 
He affirms that a person blind from infancy, in consequence 
of the opacity of the transparent media of the eye, may 
have a perfect internal conception of light and colors. 
Every one is aware how common it is to see bright colors, 
and even various objects, while the eye is closed. So of 
hearing, we know from frequent experience that various 
sounds are heard, even music, which arise from within, or 
in the soul itself. (Mutter's Elements of Physiology, pp. 
1059, 1060.) 

Vision is possible without the external organ of sight. 
Even the Scotch metaphysician, Reid, in speaking of the 
senses, and that we perceive external things through them, 
for which we can give no reason except that it is the will of 
God, declares that no man can show it to be impossible to 
the Supreme Being to have given us the power of perceiving 
what he calls external objects without such organs. This is 
what God has clone. He has given to every one of us the 
power to see things in idea, or with the mind independent of 
all organic conditions. This has been taken from the class 
of hypothetical or supposed things, and demonstrated to 
be true. On this subject S.ir William Hamilton remarks : 
' w However astonishing, it is now proved beyond all rational 
doubt, that in certain abnormal (?) states of the nervous 
organism, perceptions are possible through other than the 
ordinary channels of the senses." 

Before anything can exist in the world of sense, it must 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 51 

have pre- existence as an idea. We may consider this an es- 
tablished principle. As the mechanic forms the watch first 
as an ideal creation before it becomes an objective reality or 
actuality, so before we can become well we must form in the 
mind a distinct idea of the change to be effected in us. We 
must have the perfect idea of health, and this will act as a 
cause, for ideas sustain to all the objects of sense a causal 
relation. In giving treatment to another we must form in 
our minds a distinct conception, or idea, of the change to 
be effected in him, and commit this to the Universal Life 
Principle, the Demiurgic Intellect, the Living Intelligence 
that forms the world, and all that is in it, and even the 
human body, after the pattern of pre-existing ideas. Our 
idea, transferred to the soul of the patient, will become 
ultimated in a physiological impulse in the direction of the 
change we desire to inaugurate. 

This method of cure conforms to the divine procedure in 
the formation of the human body, as described in one of the 
profoundest of the sacred hymns of the Hebrews. ''Thou 
hast formed my reins : thou hast knit me together in my 
mother's womb. I will give thanks unto thee ; for I am 
fearfully and wonderfully made : wonderful are thy works ; 
and that my soul knoweth right well. My frame was not 
hidden from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously 
wrought in the lowest parts of the earth (or the sub-astral 
region) . Thine eyes (as the symbol of the creative intelli- 
gence, the divine imagination, or the idea-forming power) 
did see mine unperfect substance (the formless cosmic 
matter), and in thy book (the universal life-principle, the 
astral light, which contaius the record of all that is thought) 
were all my members written, which day by day were fash- 
ioned, when as yet there was none of them." (Ps. cxxxix : 
13-16.) This teaches that the body and all its organs were 
formed in idea before it was ultimated in the sense-world. 



52 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

When we conform to this method, we act in concert with 
God. 

Man has a body composed of the four elements. This is 
not man, nor any necessary part of his existence, but be- 
longs wholly to the material world, of which it is a limited 
expression. In the South Kensington Museum, in England, 
there is one exhibition which equally interests all classes of 
visitors. It is a human body resolved into its original ele- 
ments, or the materials of which the body of man is made. 
There they all are tied up in packages, or corked up in 
bottles. Here are so many gallons of water, for three- 
fourths of the animal body is nothing but that element. But 
this water is the same that falls in rain and snow. It comes 
from the external world, and is perpetually returning to it. 
We have so much chloride of sodium, or common salt. But 
this is not man, any more than the salt on our tables is man. 
We have so much carbonate of lime, or marble. This is not 
man or anything human, any more than the marble slab we 
place at the head of the grave. So of the iron, the mineral 
phosphates, and all the solid and gaseous elements. They 
come from the external world and return to it. An interest- 
ing fact regarding them is, that the spectroscope shows the 
identity of these elements of the human body with the ele- 
ments which compose the substance of the sun and stars. 
This fact warrants the assertion of the ancients that man is 
a microcosm, or little world. The macrocosm, or great world, 
is only a larger human bod}', and we a monad or germ cell 
in it. The body is not man any more than a tree is a man, 
for a tree in bearing is composed of the same elements. 

In this transitory, ever-changing body, the higher intelli- 
gence, the distinctively human soul, the manas, the real and 
immortal man, is imprisoned and in chains. It should be our 
aim to free the living soul from its unnatural subjection to 
material limitations, and teach it to live even while on earth 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 53 

independent of the bod}'. Forgetting the composite, ever- 
changing, and consequently mortal body, and renouncing the 
idea of it as being the man, we represent to ourselves in 
thought another body, pure, simple, and immortal, created, 
as it were, within the gross material organism, with a perfect 
form, and all the members and organs in perfection, with 
disease and all deformity left out of the conception. This is 
not a creation of the fancy, but the recognition of a reality. 
It is the real man, and sustains to the other and lower body, 
which is no real body, the relation of a sword to the scabbard, 
and of a precious gem to its casket. But a sword can be 
withdrawn from the scabbard, and a gem removed from the 
casket. Until this is done, the one does not accomplish its 
use, nor the other display its beauty. When the real man is 
discovered, and we intuitively perceive that it is not what we 
call the body, any more than a scabbard is a sword, we begin 
to exercise supernatural faculties, like the newly fledged bird 
trying its wings. We can go where we please, see without 
the ej'e, and hear with the inner ear the sounds of the unseen 
world, as distinctly as you hear my voice in the phenomenal 
world. We have begun to live eternal life. We rise out of 
that region of illusion where disease is possible, into that 
higher realm where it is impossible. We have passed over 
that " middle ground," that dangerous region of elemental 
life, which was represented by the cherubim, which obstruct 
the approach to the "tree of life." We have passed the 
guard, and put forth the hand, and eat of the fruit, and live 
forever. 

To emancipate the inward and real man from his imprison- 
ment in matter and an illusory body, is to cure disease. 
Disease is the translation into a corporeal expression of a 
wrong or false idea of man. Its cure must commence with 
the obliteration of that false conception, and the formation 
of the true idea of ourselves and of the patient. This is the 






54 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

dawning of a new clay. After forming the true idea of man, 
we may give a tacit verbal expression to it by using the fol- 
lowing formula, or any form of words that will ultimate the 
conception. 

"In our inmost and true existence and real self, we are 
not and cannot be diseased, for we are included in the being 
of the Father of Spirits. Our real life and true being are 
hid with Christ in God, and our spirit as a manifestation and 
personal limitation of the Universal Spirit is already immor- 
tal in its nature and essence, and disease and pain and 
sorrow are impossible to it. And this disease (naming the 
malady, if we desire to do so) is outside of our unchanging 
and undying personality, and we view it as to us non- 
existent. We pray the Infinite Father, in the name of Jesus 
Christ, to make us whole. In the silence and stillness of our 
own soul and will, we pray that Jesus, who represents the 
only saving, healing principle in the universe, will speak the 
vivifying inner Word, the Word of life, to the soul of this 
person ; and cause the light of that supreme and eternal truth, 
which alone can make us free, to illume the darkness of his 
mind, and liberate the inner man from the fetters of sense 
and the dominion of sin." 

It is important to bear in mind that as thought is the 
creative principle, and as everything which exists in nature 
as an objective reality must pre-exist as an idea, so what- 
ever is conceivable in thought is possible. Says Sir William 
Hamilton : "All necessity is to us, in fact, subjective ; for a 
thing is conceived impossible only as we are unable to con- 
strue it in thought. Whatever does not violate the laws of 
thought is, therefore, not to us impossible, however firmly we 
may be convinced that it will not occur. For example, we 
hold it absolutely impossible that a thing can begin to be 
without a cause. Why? Simply because the mind cannot 
realize to itself the conception of absolute commencement. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 55 

That a stone should ascend into the air, we firmly believe 
will never happen, but we find no difficulty in conceiving it 
possible." {Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 403.) 

This law, that whatever is conceivable is possible, is 
expressed by Jesus in this way, "If thou canst believe, all 
things are possible to him that believeth." (Mark ix:23.) 
That I should recover from a disease which medical science, 
so called, pronounces incurable, and become perfectly well, 
is a possible conception. It contravenes no law of thought. 
It may, therefore, rationally be an object of faith, and 
consequently become an actuality. For faith may make 
actual whatever is possible in thought. When we attain to 
the true life of faith, things which are impossible to the 
natural or psychical man become easy of accomplishment. 



56 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER V. 

IS DISEASE A REALITY OR AN ILLUSION? 

Reality has a different meaning from actuality. By 
actuality is meant the ultimation of an ideal or subjective 
conception in matter. In that sense a thing ma}- be real and 
not an actuality. 

It is said bj r Paul, that God hath called us from the 
beginning, or from the first principle of things, the Logos, 
or region of an ideal creation, unto salvation in sanctification 
of the spirit and belief of the truth. (2 Thes. ii : 13.) Sancti- 
fication of the spirit is the recognition of the truth that all 
spirit is a divine substance, and consequently our own spirit, 
which is the real self, is pure and free from sin and disease. 
Thus the spirit of life, which is a Hebraism for the living 
spirit, in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of 
sin and death ; that is, the orderly operation of the spirit 
counteracts the effects of the fixed order of the operation of 
the errors of the understanding and the delusions of sense. 
(Rom. viii : 2.) 

We attain unto salvation from sin and its consequences in 
disease and death by the belief of the truth. Now truth 
expresses that which is, in opposition to that which is not, 
and which only seems to be. An intuitive perception of 
supersensuous verities, or of truths which lie above and 
be} T ond the grasp of the senses, is the ancient and royal road 
to health and salvation. Jesus, who was himself the way, and 
the truth, and the life, affirms that we are made free by the 
knowledge of the truth. (John viii : 32.) But this is not 
effected by every truth. The mere common verities, or 
fragmentary truths, as that two plus three are five, and that 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 57 

the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, do not 
save us, though they are sacred and useful. There is a 
supreme and eternal truth, which includes all other truths in 
it, and the intuition of this has a saving and redeeming 
power in it. The highest truth in the universe is that God 
is all, and all that truly exists is a manifestation of God. 
(Eph. iv : 6.) The manifested God is the to ayaOov of Plato, 
the Christ of Paul, the supreme and eternal Goodness ; and 
all things that have true being are an expression of this. 
All else is illusion, or a false appearance. Nothing can go 
forth from God that is not always in God. Ail that is is 
God, and hence is good. That which is not good is not 
God, and hence has no existence. All that which is is 
included in God. Disease, when viewed as an evil, has no 
existence except as an illusion or deceptive sensuous appear- 
ance. As such it is a nihility, or nothingne>>. 

So far as disease is a condition of the body, like all matter, 
it is only an appearance, a sensuous seeming, an empty show. 
The general conclusion of modern philosophy is well stated 
by Lotze, and is only the reinstatement of the old Hermetic 
science. He says : " Everything we supposed our- 
selves to know of matter as an obvious and independent 
existence,' has long since been dissolved in the con- 
viction that matter itself, together with the space, by 
filling which it seemed most convincingly to prove its peculiar 
nature, is nothing but an appearance for our perception." 
{Metapliysic, by Herman Lotze, p. 438.) 

\Yhat we call matter, includiug the gross material body, 
has existence only as a false seeming. The supreme reality 
in the universe is spirit. 

Another of those great saving truths, the intuitive percep- 
tion of which has for the soul a redeeming efficacy, is the 
inclusion of my true being and immortal self in the Christ, 
or the universal Spirit. Every universal is made up of 



58 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

particulars, and the particulars are contained in the 
universal. Every perfect whole is made up of parts, each 
of which is in the likeness of the whole, and is an image of 
it. Thus, the bod}* of man is a collection and aggregation ■ 
of primary cells, each of which is in the form of the entire 
body. It is the corporeal unit. So there is a universal 
Spirit, a collective Divine Man, who is the manifested God, 
and the Christ, and each individual spirit sustains to it the 
same relation that the cell does to the the human body. The 
Christ within, which is the particular spirit, as a personal 
limitation and finite expression of the universal Christ, is an 
image of the whole, from which it is never sundered. This 
is the only reality in human nature — all else is illusion. It 
is the great mystery of the Gospel, and of godliness — God 
manifested in the flesh, and in my flesh. Of the real Self, 
the Christ within, we may always predicate perfect health 
and blessedness. The recognition of this sublime and 
eternal truth, and a steadfast adherence to it and practical 
belief of it, is an act of saving faith. It is a divine truth on 
whose head God has placed a crown, and all sensuous 
delusions will surrender to it and pay it homage. When 
Christ, who is our inmost and real life, appears to us and in 
us, then we also appear with him in glory, and share with 
him the throne of his glory. 

The man that I am in Christ is a different man from the 
ps3chical and external homo, the biped and bimanas animal, 
the subject of sin and disease. In the world, that is, in the 
lower and external range of our existence, we have tribula- 
tion ; but the man that I am in Christ has peace. (John 
xvi : 33.) No man or religious sect can obtain a monopoly 
of the great truth, that our inner self is included in the being 
of the manifested God, the universal Christ, any more than 
a company could be formed with a charter of incorporation 
investing them with the exclusive ownership of the sun, I 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. l>0 

own the sun, and the whole sun, aud so does every human 
being. Every man's spirit is, to speak according to analogy, 
a cell in the God-Man and the Man-God, and each indivi- 
dual spiritual entity shares the glory of the whole. The 
universal Spirit, viewed as a collective Divine Human 
Principle, is called "the Father of spirits," as the atmosphere 
is the parent source of every breeze and every breath. 
Whatever Jesus thought and said of his relation to the Father, 
he has taught every human spirit as an immortal Son of 
God, to think and affirm of itself. I and my Father are one, 
for the whole collective life of spirit circulates through each 
individual spirit. And as nothing impure, or false, or evil, 
can enter the realm of spirit, or the bosom of the Father, as 
it is called, so my immortal Ego, whose life is bound up in 
the same bundle of life with the Father, is free from sin and 
disease. The Father is in me, and I am in the Father. I 
came forth from the Father without going out of him, just as 
a thought or an idea is never external to the mind that 
thinks. I return to the Father without journeying through 
space, when I become intuitively conscious that in him I 
live, and am moved, and have my being. 

The Christ within is the God of the microcosmic man, as 
the Universal Christ is the God of the macrocosm, and thou 
shalt love the Lord, the God of thee, with all thy heart. 
(Matt, xxii : 37.) This divine spirit in most men only over- 
shadows all the lower degrees of our being, like the sun 
shining above the clouds that conceal him from the earth. 
If the obstructing vapor becomes etherealized and transpar- 
ent, then he shines directly upon and into the earth. When 
the spirit penetrates and pervades with his life all below it 
in man, even the corporeal organism, then the Christ comes 
in the flesh, and the man is an incarnation of God. This is 
the divine ideal becoming the actual, as in Jesus. This is 
full salvation and perfect health. 



GO ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

Another great spiritual truth, having in it a practical 
redeeming efficacy, is that of the illusion of the senses. The 
prof ounclest and most transcendental teachings of the Oriental 
religious philosophies, including Buddhism, Brahmanism, 
Kabalistic Judaism, and esoteric Christianity, are based on 
the eternal truth, that all our sense-perceptions are an illusion, 
or deceptive appearance, and our senses never tell us the real 
truth, but only that which is an inversion of the truth. The 
directly opposite of the perceptions of the psychical man are 
true. This is a principle as fixed as that the opposite of 
darkness is light, and is one of far-reaching practical value. 
To think rightly, or, in the words of Jesus, to judge righteous 
judgment, we are to judge and decide directly contrary to 
the illusory decisions of the sensuous degree of the mind, for 
it is only in that wa}~ that we can come to the cognition of 
the real truth. This is an established principle in philosophy, 
and constitutes a pathway of solid rock over which we may walk 
by faith, from disease to health and blessedness. It is the 
thread of Ariadne, which, when we trace it back, conducts us 
out of the labyrinth of error in which we are imprisoned. It 
is an ujjhill and shining waj", the path of the just, up which 
we may calmly walk till we reach that mountain summit of 
health and holiness, from which we have descended into our 
present lapsed condition. 

According to this principle, which is the method of philoso- 
phizing called the reconciliation of contradictions, pain is a 
pleasure misunderstood. The psychical man or mind falsely 
views it as an evil, and by thinking so, makes it an evil. 
But pain is always a good, and all good is in its nature and 
essence pleasant and delightful. This is what all men mean 
by the word good. A boil is not an evil, much less a disease, 
but a good thing. "When I no longer view it as an evil, but 
a good, then the pain ceases, for all good is a pleasure. A 
thins is to us what we think and believe it to be. 



\ 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. Gl 

In accordance with the principle we are discussing, loss is 
gain, disease is health, sorrow is joy, and death is life. 
Disease is an effort of the divine life-principle in us in the 
direction of true health. Nausea is only an effort of nature, 
the divine Archceus of Van Helmont, to rid the stomach of 
something antagonistic to the life-principle in us. Hence the 
action of the stomach is inverted. If this does not succeed, 
nature intensities and accelerates the natural peristaltic action 
of the stomach and intestinal canal, and a diarrhoea is the 
result, which is not a disease or an evil, only as we make it 
so by our way of thinking. It is a device of nature to rid 
the system of that which is injurious. The body is often 
renewed and rejuvenated by a fever ; and a fever is not a 
disease, but a remedy. It is not an evil, but a good, and all 
good is pleasant. As death, according to Swedenborg, is 
not the extinction of life, but a higher exhibition of it which 
is called anastasis, or resurrection, so disease, which precedes 
death and leads to it, signifies that which is progressive to 
regeneration or newness of life. (Arcana Celestia, G221.) 
This, he affirms, is the signification of disease among the 
angels, and consequently it bears this meaning to the higher 
intelligence of man ; for Swedenborg's angels, like Milton's, 
are only a superior kind of men. Disease is always a remedy. 
And if as a phenomenon or appearance, it is so interpreted by 
the light of the spirit, and not by the darkness and blindness 
of sense, it will essentially change its nature and effects. 

What we call sorrow is not so only in name. It is always 
the memory of a joy that has passed out of present conscious- 
ness, but not out of existence. No state of joy, or peace, 
or health, that we have ever experienced, is lost, or ever can 
be lost, to our being. It may have passed out of the present 
consciousness of the soul, but according to the Buddhist doc- 
trine of karma, and the Swedenborgian doctrine of remains 
(reliquke, or relics), it is stored up in us as an everlasting 



62 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

inheritance. Our early states of youthful bliss and health, 
and all the innocent joys of childhood, have not been obliter- 
ated from the imperishable tablet of the higher soul, but have 
only gone to seed, and are treasured up in our interiors as 
living germs, that only need the dews of heaven to cause 
them to spring up again in a larger harvest. They cau be 
made to emerge into consciousness, and be remitted from 
the interior into the exterior or psychical man. In this sense, 
by an immutable law of our being, what we have sown we 
shall sometime reap, and with an increase. The cure of 
disease in ourselves or others is a recovery, or a restoration to 
the consciousness of the lower soul of that which has passed 
inward, and has been reserved in the interiors of man by the 
Lord of life, but has not dropped out of existence. To view 
it in that light is the best way to call it back again. Health 
is within ; and if we look for it in any other place, we miss it. 
It will be like searching the forests to find a lost child, when 
he is ail the time asleep in his chamber. If we had only 
known where he was to be found, all our search abroad would 
have been avoided. To cure disease is to restore to the soul 
that state of health which we mourn as lost, but which is 
still in the higher apartment of our being. " He restoreth 
my soul, and guideth me in the paths of righteousness (or 
spiritual truth) for his name's sake." (Ps. xxiii : 3.) 

Another fundamental truth of the Hermetic philosoplry, 
and which brings freedom to the soul of man, is, that matter 
(in its reality), like spirit, is exempt from disease and cor- 
ruption. Spirit and matter are the two extreme links in the 
chain of existence. They are co-eternal and co-extensive, and 
equally divine. Like the two forces of the magnet, the posi- 
tive and the negative, each implies the other, and neither 
can exist without the other. But we are not speaking of 
what men in general call matter, but of a divine substance. 
Between the two extreme links of existence, spirit and mat- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. Go 

ter, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, the 
Father and the Mother, all other existences are situated. The 
phenomenon which we call matter is but an illusion. It is 
not substance, but a deceptive appearance. The real body 
of man is never diseased, for in its essence it is a divine, an 
indestructible, and immortal substance. It is the Bride of 
the Spirit. If the Spirit of man is not diseased (and this is 
admitted) , and if the body as to its invisible inward essence 
is pure and free from disease and corruption, then we ask, 
What is disease but an illusion of the senses, a false appear- 
ance, that ought to count for nothing? It is among the cer- 
tainties that disease is not the reality it passes current for in 
an unbelieving world. Matter as the pure cosmic substance, 
the divine Mother principle, is as immortal as spirit, of which 
it is the correlative opposite and necessary counterpart in the 
creative balance. 

What is called dirt and filth is only so to a superficial 
gaze and shallow way of thinking. What we call filth, in 
its inner essence, its divine chemistry, is as pure as the 
diamond, or the precious stones which constitute the founda- 
tion of the walls of the New Jerusalem. As filth is not filth 
except to the stupid gaze of ignorance, and as a false opin- 
ion of things is the only dirt in the universe, so disease 
has existence onl} T as a misbelief. It has existence neither 
in the spirit of man, nor in the real substance of the body. 
And as all existence is included in the grasp of these ex- 
tremes, it must be viewed as non-existent. 

In the phrenopathic method of cure the question will often 
recur, What is man ? And the answer will always be in 
order, that man is a being, made in the image of God, and 
only a little while inferior to the angels, and crowned with 
glory, and honor, and immortality. (Ps. 8 : 4-6.) Certainly 
the outward body, though fearfully and wonderfully made, 
is not man ; for when the mortal coil is shuffled off, nothing 



64 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

has been lost. The five external senses are not man, for 
these belong wholl}- to the body. The mind, on the plane 
of sense, the mere animal soul taken b} r itself, does not 
answer to the idea of man. The distinctively human prin- 
ciple is spiritual, immortal, and incorruptible. As disease 
and sin are in the lower soul, and as this is not man, it fol- 
lows that these are not predicable of the true self. Man, 
that is, that which is the distinctively human principle and 
undying personality, that which is more than an animal, is 
neither sick nor sinful. When through love and faith, 
which penetrate to that within the veil, we recognize the 
good that is in man, and are blind to the evil that is external 
to the real humanity, it serves to develop that good. It 
craves recognition, and is in an effort to make itself known. 
And when recognized in some mind., it strengthens its ten- 
dency to an ultimate manifestation. This seems to have 
been what Jesus did. He recognized good in publicans and 
sinners, and condemned none, and thus lifted from them the 
millstone that was sinking them into the depths. In the 
physical wrecks around him he beheld only the inner man, 
and addressed himself to that. When we recognize that in 
man which is immortal, and consequently never sick, it serves 
to develop that also. It opens the prison to them that are 
bound, and sets the captive free. 

" Let's find the sunny side of men, 

Or be believers in it : 
A light there is in every soul 

That takes the pains to win it. 
Oh! there's a slumbering good in all, 

And we perchance may wake it ; 
Our hands contain the magic wand : 

This life is what we make it." 

"And when the Christ that is in us is raised from the 
dead, he dieth no more ; death no more hath dominion over 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 65 

him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once for all ; 
but in that life that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Even so 
reckon ye yourselves to be dead unto siu, but alive unto God 
in Christ Jesus." (Rom. 6:9-11.) 

. Reality expresses what is; illusion is what only appears 
to be. The human body is not man, and its diseases are no 
part of our true humanity. Owing to the dominating influ- 
ence of the senses, we accept appearances for realities, and 
take the shadow of man for the man himself. This is the 
fundamental error of the world. But when a man, suffering 
from disease, sees through the glimmering light of the 
supreme knowledge that the external body is not the self, 
but is the most unreal thing in human nature, and that 
his disease is outside his immortal self, it is like returning 
light to the blind, or like the first break of day after the long 
Arctic night. In a fragment of the books of Hermes, it is 
said, "Mundane things (which include the body and its 
maladies) are not themselves real, but only the simulacra of 
reality, and not all are even such ; some are but illusion and 
error, fantastic appearances, mere phantoms. When such 
an appearance receives an influx from above, then, indeed, 
it becomes a similitude of the real ; but without this superior 
influence, it remains an illusion. In the same way a portrait 
is a painted image of a body, but is not the body it repre- 
sents. It appears to have eyes, but sees nothing ; ears, but 
hears nothing ; and so on of the rest of it. It is an image 
which deceives the sight ; it appears a reality, and is but a 
shadow. Those who behold not the false behold the true. 
If, then, we understand and see every thing as it truly is, we 
see the real ; but if we see that which is not, we can neither 
understand nor know anything of the real." 



()6 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE FALL AND THE REDEMPTION, OR THE FUNDAMENTAL EVIL 
IN HUMAN NATURE, AND THE REMEDY. 

The fall of man was not the result of any single act of 
disobedience to the divine will, as the eating of some for- 
bidden fruit, but was rather the gradual descent of man in 
the scale of life and thought, from a spiritual altitude or 
plane of existence, into a condition of bondage to the exter- 
nal senses, and to the limitations of time and space. How 
great was this subsidence of the life of man few can com- 
prehend, because the height from which human nature has 
descended to its present sensuous level is beyond the concep- 
tion of the psychical man. The fall is a total inversion of 
the divine order of life. That which is divine and immortal 
in man, the spirit, which is the seat of all the deific powers 
of man, is brought into subjection to the bod}^, and is 
fettered in its action by the limitations of matter. The 
original condition of man is symbolically represented by his 
being placed in the garden of Eden, which the Lord planted 
in the East, which signifies the realm of pure spirit, which 
is the true Orient, the arising, the origin of all things ; and 
the garden into which the "Lord God" put man, signifies 
the clear intuitions of celestial love, a perception of truth 
derived from the Lord in man. By the Eloheim is meant the. 
God who creates and governs the world, the macrocosmic 
universe. B3- the Adonai, or Lord, is signified our God, or 
deific centre, the divine spirit in man. To eat of the tree of 
life is to perceive and recognize the truth that all life and all 
intelligence are from the Lord, and are the Lord in man. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 67 

To eat of the tree of knowledge (external, carnal knowl- 
edge) represents symbolically the life of sense, which is 
accompanied with the feeling that our intelligence and life 
are self-derived. 

To understand more clearly the nature of the fall and the 
redemption, we remark that there is in us an internal and an 
external man. The latter is composed of what is usually 
denominated the body, the gross material organism, and the 
astral soul, the nephesh of the Jewish psychology, the lowest 
animal nature. These two are but the shadow of man. 
The external is the mortal man, for at death the corporeal 
organism and the anima bruta are thrown off. These are 
not of necessity evil, only as they come to dominate over 
the higher nature. The internal man, in its highest degree, 
is divine, immortal, and celestial. In the fall of man the 
due relations between the internal and external man are sub- 
verted. The governing will is transferred from the spirit, 
which is the highest in man, to the bod} 7 , which is the lowest. 
From this inversion of the true order of our existence, sin, 
disease, and all our misery have entered into the world. 
The redemption of man is the reversion of this order. The 
sceptre is wrested from the body and the animal soul, and 
the divine spirit of man is reinstated in its rightful gover- 
nance of the whole human kingdom. When the inner man, 
the spirit, regains its rightful control of the body, man has 
attained "the crown of life," and is exempt from disease, 
and even death. By redemption, then, we mean a deliver- 
ance from the controlling influence of the body and the astral 
soul, and it is only because man has fallen under the domin- 
ion of the body and the animal senses, that he needs 
redemption. 

But how is this consummation, so devoutly to be wished, 
to be attained ? Can -any light be thrown upon the path that 
unerringly conducts to it? Is there no way out of our mis- 



bo ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

cry ? Is there no remedy for the ills to which our life on 
earth is constantly liable ? Is the key that opens the prison 
lost? 

It is said of Gautama, who did for the East what Jesus, 
six hundred }'ears later, did more fully for the West, that he 
sought long and earnestly, and with extreme ascetic mortifi- 
cations, which proved of no avail, for the cause of all human 
misery. At last the light from the supreme heavens broke 
in upon him, and his mind became entirely opened, "like 
the full-blown lotus-flower," and he saw by an intuitive 
flash of the supreme knowledge, that the secret of all the 
miseries of mankind was ignorance; and the sovereign 
remedy for it was to dispel ignorance and to become wise. 
If this is not the key that unlocks our dungeon, it shows 
where. the lock is to be found. 

The teaching of the Buddha is here identical with the 
principles of esoteric Christianity. In the religious philoso- 
phy of Jesus the cause of disease and all misery is sin, an 
aberration or deflection from the truth, as the original word 
is defined in the Greek lexicons. The word is used in the 
New Testament in the sense given to it by Plato, as an error 
of the understanding, which may lead to wickedness in the 
life. Paul teaches the same doctrine as both Jesus and 
Plato and Gautama had taught in regard to the root of 
human misery. He enjoins upon the Christians of Ephesus, 
that they no longer walk, that is, live, as the Nations walk, 
in the vanity (or illusion) of their mind, being darkened in 
their understanding, and alienated from the life of God be- 
cause of the ignorance that is in them. (Eph. iv:17, 18.) 
The remedy for this is faitfi, a spiritual enlightenment which 
gives the perception of real truth. The ignorance, which is 
the underlying cause of all our misery, is not merely a want 
of knowledge, nor is it a lack of what is called science, for 
that is only a sensuous knowledge, the superficial observa- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. &9 

tion of facts, but it is a total inversion of the real truth. 
Through this sin, or inversion of the truth, we are led to 
consider that as real which is only a false seeming ; and that 
which is the real and the enduring we deem an illusion and a 
phantom ; and we are influenced to desire and laboriously 
seek as our highest good, and object of supreme quest, that 
which is of no worth, and even hurtful. In this dense igno- 
rance the body is viewed as the man. The shadow is taken 
for substance. The existence of the higher soul is doubted 
or denied, and the being of the spirit is wholly unknown. 
Our sense-perceptions, which are always illusory and a decep- 
tive appearance, are accepted without question, and their fal- 
lacious testimony is received as the highest and most certain 
form of knowledge. Matter, or what we call matter, which 
is not substance, but is the most unreal thing in the uni- 
verse, is exalted into the place of God in our thoughts, and 
made the all in all of existence. This is the essence of 
idolatry. 

In this fallen and inverted condition, which is a hot-bed of 
disease and all evil, influx from the lower region of the 
world of spirits, as it is called by Swcdenborg, the astral 
plane of life, the region of undeveloped elemental and ele- 
mentary souls, has a preponderating influence in the life of 
man. These are the ''demons" of the Platonic philosophy 
and of the New Testament, which Jesus "cast out" from 
those he healed. Influx from this disorderly realm intensi- 
fies the tendenc}' to an} T morbid condition of the mind and 
body, and like a dark cloud between us and the sun, shuts 
out the inflowing of light and life from the world of pure 
spirit, the region of the supreme and saving knowledge. 
The deliverance of man from this condition, and the read- 
justment of his relatious to the spiritual world, is an impor- 
tant preliminary act in our redemption ; for man can be 
saved only in perfect freedom. The dispersion of the ele- 



70 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

rneutary or astral influences, and the placing of man in a 
position where he can receive influx from the realm of spirit, 
or the Universal Christ, is called a day of judgment or sep- 
aration, and this has been effected for the world. This 
region or sphere of astral souls, the highest of whom are 
symbolized by the four-faced Cherubim, comes between us 
and the sun of a higher sky, as a dense fog obscures the 
light of clay, and veils the heavens from our view. How 
can we be saved from their overmastering influence? Often- 
times prayer, the tranquil aspiration of the soul towards the 
Highest and the Best, and a resolve " to know nothing but 
the Christ," is our most effectual remedy. The soul is " like 
an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a 
cry." Every night is followed by its morning. Jesus cast 
out the spirits by " the Word" — a condensed expression of 
the Supreme and Eternal Truth, which formulates itself in 
the Universal Living Principle. 

Our redemption or liberation from corporeal bondage, is 
not effected by the passion of the cross, nor by anything 
external, but always comes from within. It is a develop- 
ment of our inmost and real Self. The spirit in us, which 
is the inward Christ, and which is always in accord with the 
Universal Spirit, who is the Father, being reinstated in his 
rightful dominion over all below it in man, even the body, is 
the redeemer. We do not mean by this that man is or ever 
can be redeemed without God. The divine spirit in man is 
never separated from the manifested God, who is called the 
Christ. It acts in and from the Father. And it is the 
Christ principle alone that can deliver us from the power of 
darkness (or the life of sense), and translate us into the 
kingdom of God's dear Son (or into the reign of the immor- 
tal spirit in us). Through the blood of the Christ (the living 
truths of the spirit) we have redemption, even the remission 
of our sins (or the putting away of the illusions of the sen- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 71 

suous aniinal soul). (Eph. i : 7. Col. i: 12-14.) If it is 
this alone which can dispel the darkness of the psychical man, 
and give us freedom from our bondage, how may we obtain 
the perception of this supreme, saving truth? That is the 
great question which thousands will ask me to solve. For- 
tunately, the answer is not difficult. 

Truth corresponds to light, and is represented by it, be- 
cause light in the world of nature is truth in the realm of 
mind. The bondage to the senses, which is the general 
state of mankind, with its errors and fallacious appearances, 
each of which is a fetter of the soul, is called darkness, and 
in this condition man is represented as in chains of darkness. 
The lower soul of man is the basement story of our exist- 
ence. If the basement story of our dwelling is dark and 
dank, we open a window from within, and the light, by a 
law of its nature, comes in and illumes the darkness, — or it 
appears to come in, — but in reality is developed from within. 
So if we throw open the windows of the soul, removing the 
bars and bolts from within, the celestial light of truth will 
flow in and enlighten the darkness of error into which we 
are plunged, and which is the spring of ail our disease and 
misery. The world is under the powerful dominion of phan- 
tasy or illusion. It is only the living truths of the spirit, 
the region in us of intuition, and the ineffable light of the 
supreme knowledge, which is mystically called the blood of 
the Christ, that can disenchant us. Our inmost Spirit and 
undying Self represents to us the Universal Christ, who. like 
the Buddha, is the All-Knowing One, and the principle and 
source of enlightenment in us. The sole condition of receiv- 
ing this saving truth and living light of the heavens is the 
desire for it. Truth, grounded in the affections, will grow 
into an intuitional enlightenment, a permanent state of in- 
sight. God is Light, and the centre whence emanates the 
supreme effulgence of truth. If we adore him as such, 



72 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

we shall behold him. Truth in us is never separated from 
God. 

" God dvvelleth in a light far out of human ken ; 
Become thyself that light, and thou shalt see him then." 

Every successive advance of man, as a collective race or 
as an individual, is a progressive approach to the true vision 
or understanding of God. When that vision is attained, and 
man is revealed to himself, our development is complete and 
our salvation full ; for to know God, and to know our Self as 
included in him, is eternal life. We cannot know him as 
external to our inward Self ; for that which has not some- 
thing in me that answers to it, is unknowable. The Lord, 
the Adonai of the Old Testament, is my God, and my in- 
most divine self and life, and as such cannot be diseased or 
sinful. 

The celestial heavens, the realm of saving truth, the light 
of life, are not far off from our inner being. Things may 
seem outwardly distant, but may nevertheless be inwardly 
near. Everything exists for us in thought. That of which 
we do not think has for us no existence. That of which we 
think, exists in us, and if we desire and love it, we exist in 
it. It is as near to us as our thought of it, which is never 
outside of our own minds. Nothing seems further from the 
psychical man, and from the earth, than heaven. Yet to the 
spiritual man or mind nothing is nearer to him and to the 
earth than heaveu. The central point of our existence is in 
the kingdom of the heavens. The domain of the spirit in us 
is the kingdom of God in man of which Jesus speaks. 

The law which governs the influx of saving, healing truth, 
and its reception by us, is given by Jesus in the Sermon on 
the Mount, " Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after 
righteousness : for they shall be filled." (Matt, v : G.) The 
Kabalistic righteousness, or justice, symbolized by the per- 
fect square, which means perfection, is a state of spiritual 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 73 

enlightenment, the attainment of- the gnosis, or true knowl- 
edge, which makes ns free. It is a principle which seems to 
extend through the whole universe, that a demand, a con- 
scious need, creates a supply. Hence it is said, "The 
prayer (Serjo-ts, desire, from a sense of want) of a righteous 
(or spiritually enlightened) man availeth much in its work- 
ing." (James v : 1G.) The original term expresses the idea 
that such a prayer, or desire, is a positive spiritual energy. 
The desire, the will, the wish to live the life of sense and of 
earthly pleasure, becomes an attraction of the soul in that 
direction. The things we desire gravitate towards us and 
we towards them. An inordinate desire for life in the world, 
with all its selfish gratifications, draws the disembodied soul 
into the sphere of the earth even after death. In jiccordanee 
with this law of our being, and of being in all worlds, a de- 
sire for the life of the spirit, as contra-distinguished from 
the flesh} 7 life of sense, a desire for the celestial and immor- 
tal range of existence on earth, becomes in us an inward 
impulse in that direction. If we have not this, nothing can 
be done for us : we are impervious to the light of life. Jesus 
said of the sensuous Jews of his day : "Ye will not (that is, 
wish not, desire not) to come unto me, that ye might have 
life." (John v:40.) If we have this desire and inward 
attraction, it adjusts the soul and all her powers into a state 
of receptivity, — a peaceful vacuum which the ever-present 
heavens make haste to fill. A desire for the supreme, sav- 
ing truth constitutes an affinitive attraction between the soul 
and that truth, as real as that which exists between the lode- 
stone and iron. 

Men instinctively desire deliverance from the unnatural 
domination of the body and the animal soul, for all feel this 
to be a condition of degradation ; in other words, a fall from 
the true position we were made to occupy. The bodily 
senses, by their phantasms, have so clouded the higher soul 



74 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

of man as to obscure his inner life, and obstruct the free 
development of our true being. But as long as there is a 
desire for deliverance there is a ground for hope. Hope is 
born of desire, and " faith is the substance of things hoped 
for." In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul declares that we 
who have the first fruits of the spirit (or the incipiency of 
the spiritual state of our powers) groan within ourselves, 
waiting for the adoption (the recognition of our individual 
spirit as the immortal Son of God in us) , the redemption from 
the body. (Rom. viii : 23.) This does not refer to the in- 
credible dogma of a literal resurrection from the graveyard, 
but to a state of emancipation from material and corporeal 
thralldom attainable here and now. It is a deliverance of 
the inner man from the controlling influence of the body. 
The first ray of hope comes to us with the clear intuition of 
the truth that the body has no power of its own. It is in its 
nature entirely passive and inert, and its normal function is 
to express and obey the spirit. It is no part of man, any 
more than a brazen statue is a human being. It has no 
power, except as by a wrong way of thinking we attribute 
power to it; and this is a delusion, a false belief. If it is 
true that the body has no power, then why are we so depen- 
dent upon it, and become the veriest slaves to it ? It is a 
sort of idolatr}' into which we have fallen, like the invest- 
ing of a senseless block of wood or stone with divine attri- 
butes. To attribute to gross matter what only belongs to the 
divine spirit in us, is like crowning a lifeless image of a man 
as an emperor and paying homage to it. In that case, the 
phantastic image, the eidolon, has no authorit}^ except what 
we give to it. It can neither utter a command nor enforce 
it. So the material body has no life of its own, and no 
power over us, except what we in thought ascribe to it. 
When we cease to do this, our full redemption draws near. 
The normal relation of the bodv to the inner and real man 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 4 

was clearly seen by Swedenborg, aud is well stated by bim 
in one of the profouudest of his philosophical works. " It 
is well known that the will and the understanding govern the 
body at pleasure ; for the mouth speaks what the understand- 
ing thinks, aud the body does what the will determines ; hence 
it is evident that the body is a form corresponding to the 
understanding and the will ; and as form is also predicated 
of the understanding and the will, it is evident that the form 
of the body corresponds to the form (by which is also signi- 
fied state, quality) of the understanding and the will." 
{Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. 136.) 

Again he says : "There are gestures and actions of the 
body which correspond to every affection of the mind, as 
falling down on the knees corresponds to humiliation, and 
prostration to the earth to deeper humiliation ; the spreading 
out of the hands towards heaven corresponds to supplication, 
and so forth ; those gestures or actions in the Word signify 
the affections themselves to which they correspond, because 
they represent them ; hence it may be seen what is meant by 
representations.'" (Arcana Celestia, 7596.) 

The tendency of thought and feeling to express themselves 
outwardly in gesture or some visible motion or attitude of 
the body is only an exhibition of the operation of a universal 
law. Thought and feeling are not only spontaneously 
expressed or represented in visible gestures, but also in 
invisible vital and physiological movements and activities of 
the various internal organs. If we form in our minds the 
true idea of ourselves as already immortal and free from dis- 
ease and sin, it is the function of the body to express that 
idea, not in words, gestures, and attitudes merely, but in a 
condition corresponding to it, and which is a translation of it 
into a corporeal representation. Before things can exist in 
the sense- world, or as actualities, the ideas of them as sub- 
jective realities and typical forms must subsist. For a thing, 



tit ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

be it a tree, a stone, a statue, a house, or a physical malady, 
is the externalization of an idea without which it cannot exist. 
In attaining to a state of redemption from the body we must 
determine in our minds what is the divine 'idea of man, and 
the body will conform to that idea and surrender to it. It 
is self-evident that an infinitely good and wise Creator could 
not form the plan of our life that should not be in harmony 
with himself. The divine idea of man is not one that includes 
in it the typical representation of man as diseased, sinful, and 
unhappy. 

There is a principle in man, or a primordial substance, 
which lies in absolute subjection to the will of the spirit. It 
is the astral bod}*, and is that on which the gross material 
phantom is dependent for its existence. It is that which is 
denominated b}* Paul, the psychical body, — as being the body 
of the soul, — and which has been grossly mistranslated the 
" natural body." " There is a psychical body, and there is 
a spiritual body." (1 Cor. xv : 44.) The spirit of man docs 
not act directly on the external body, the gross physical 
organism, but on this intermediate principle, and through that 
moves and affects the outward shell. Every particle of this 
psychical body and elemental substance is capable of respond- 
ing with instantaneous celerity to the dictates of the sover- 
eign will of the spirit. As a lake reposing in stillness among 
the hills, in a clear night and beneath a cloudless sky, mir- 
rors and reflects the stars and planets and all the objects 
above it in the heavens, so this passive substance reflects and 
responds to the ideas in our minds. As the stars with 
"mimic glory" shine in the water, and are mirrored in its 
placid surface, so the real knowledges of things, the true 
ideas of God and man, will become expressed in the body. 

The man who can steadfastly think the truth in regard to 
his real being has the key that unlocks the handcuffs of 
his soul, and his immortal powers are set free. The spirit of 
man, the real self, is safe from sin and disease. Secure in 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 77 

its stronghold on the heights of Divinity, and immortal in 
every part, though assailed and besieged by a crowd of sen- 
suous illusions and phantoms more numerous than the army of 
Senaeherib which approached Jerusalem and Zion, it may rest 
in peace, like the Southern Cross in the heavens. Until that 
can be plucked down from the firmament and laid in the dust, 
we as immortal spirits cannot be dislodged from our dwelling 
place in the life of God. The spirit of man is so intermin- 
gled and iuterblended with the existence of the Father, that 
by a supreme act of faith it may ever say, "Because he 
lives, I live ; because he is free from disease, so am I." 
Though the body may be put off and become a wreck, and 
be dissolved back into its original elements, yet the redeemed 
soul may view it. not as death, but as the wreck of the shell 
out of which an angel is born. For it is a law as universal 
as the presence of God in nature, that out of what the world 
falsely calls death there is always evolved a higher form and 
order of life. There is no death. All is boundless, end- 
less, omnipresent, and omniactive life. As death is an illusion 
or deceptive appearance, so is disease when viewed from the 
lofty altitude of an assured faith. To the touch of Christian 
faith, the empty bubble which appears to the mind on the 
plane of sense a solid reality, bursts and becomes a crystal 
drop of the water of life. A minister remarked at the 
funeral of a neighbor of ours a few days ago, that it was 
difficult for the natural man to feel that he was going to die. 
That may be true, but it is more difficult for the psychical 
man or mind to realize the truth that he will never die. and 
that the diseases of men are only a struggle of the soul into 
immortality on earth and in the heavens. Disease is the 
dream that precedes and occasions our waking into life. It 
is the shock that comes to startle us from the slumber of a 
life of sense, an alarm-clock that is set to wake us at break 
of day. 



78 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE GLORIFICATION OF OUR HUMANITY, OR FULL SALVATION 
FROM SIN AND DISEASE. 

We are told by Paul that those who seek for glory and 
honor and incorruption have their search rewarded by the 
discovery of eternal life, not in an indefinite and distant 
future, which has no existence, but in the divine moment, 
the ever-present and eternal now. The word glory, in its 
popular acceptation, signifies an external brightness, a sort 
of dazzling splendor. But besides its exoteric or common 
meaning, it has a deeper esoteric meaning, as Plato in the 
Cratylus has more than hinted. The word for glory in the 
original language of the New Testament is derived from a 
verb which means to think. In this interior sense, the word 
glory signifies the highest state of inward illumination. To 
glorify God is to think well and rightly of him. To glorify 
our humanity is to attain to the true conception of it, as an 
incorruptible and immortal divine manifestation. The in- 
ward and real self, the I Am, is recognized as identical with 
the " Lord." This is the final secret which God holds in 
reserve for those who love him, and to be made known to 
them in the fulness of time, or wheu in the progress of our 
spiritual unfoldment the auspicious moment arrives. The 
Christ, as I have often said in the preceding pages, is the 
manifested God, the first emanation from the "Unknown," 
a manifestation of God as the Universal Man, or a Divine 
Human Principle, and this God in ns is the Lord. The 
Lord is our God, the God of the microcosmic man as well 
as of the macrocosmic universe. He is Immanuel, which is, 



AXE MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 79 

being interpreted, God in us, and as constituting our inner 
and true self. Hence, as Al Ghazzali, in his Alchemy of 
Happiness, quoting the ancient prophets or spiritual teach- 
ers, has said, " He who knows himself, knows his Lord 
also." And we might affirm that he who truly knows the 
Lord, comes also to the true knowledge of the self, for the 
two are one and the same. 

This glorification of our humanity is the highest condition 
of "grace." This word, like the word glory, has an eso- 
teric signification. In its exoteric or external acceptation, 
it means mercy and favor ; but in its Kabalistic sense, it 
means the secret teaching of the masters. It came to have 
this meaning in this way : they took the two Hebrew words 
for " hidden wisdom," which was a designation of the Ka- 
bala, and from the initials of the two a third word was 
formed, and that is the word for grace. Hence, grace signi- 
fies the occult spiritual wisdom, which Paul spake only to 
the "perfect" or fully instructed. This gives the full mean- 
ing to many passages of the New Testament. " By grace 
ye are saved ;" that is, we attain to salvation by the knowl- 
edge of the supreme truth that lies beyond the ken of the 
psychical man. It is said in the Gospel of John, that the 
laiv, or the external system of truth, came by Moses ; but 
grace and truth came by Jesus the Christ. (John i : 17.) 

Jesus came to do for the world at large, by revealing the 
sublime wisdom of the ancient mystical sects and brother- 
hoods, what had been done only to the choseu few in the 
sacred privacy of the inner recesses of the temples. But 
Jesus, whose maxim was, "there is nothing hid that should 
not be revealed" for the benefit of mankind, has done this 
more fully than was ever done to the initiate in the sacred 
mysteries. And may this "grace" of our Lord Jesus Christ 
be with us. (Rom. xvi : 20.) And ma}* we grow in the 
grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior, 



80 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

or Health-Giver. (2 Peter iii:18.) For the true knowl- 
edge of Jesus is the most important of all knowledge attain- 
able by the mind and heart of man. In his triple name he 
represents to us the first divine triad of the Ten Sephiroth, 
or emanative principles. He is the divine exemplar, or 
model humanity, showing to all ages and races of men the 
possibilities of the spiritual development of man. For what 
he attained, our human nature may reach. This he plainly 
teaches. (John xiv : 3 ; xvii:24.) He was the Christ, 
and we may be raised to the Christ-sphere of life. This is 
implied in our becoming truly Christian. For the word 
Christian is but a diminutive of Christ. He is the Jah or 
Yah, the divine Yes, the Amen, the pure intelligence, the 
Nous of the Greeks. (2 Cor. i : 20.) This is the second 
emanative principle, and is called the Lord. Kurios, the 
Greek name for Adonai or Lord, was viewed by the ancients 
as the God-Mind, a divine intelligence in the world. Plato, 
in the Cratylus, says that " Kurios signifies the pure and 
unmixed nature of intellect." 

He is the Yava, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the 
third emanation from the "Unknown," the perfect union 
of pure intelligence with pure love ; and as such is the 
Savior, or Health-Giver, to the souls and bodies of men. 
The Jehovah of the Old Testament is identical with the 
Hebrew name of Jesus, and in Jesus the word is translated 
into its true significance, and thus freed from the horrible 
perversions of its meaning in exoteric Judaism. In Jesus, 
Jehovah becomes once more to men, not a Deity to be 
feared, but the Bon Dieu, the Good God, to be loved and 
trusted with all the heart. 

There are many sincere people who are inquiring the way 
to a true spiritual life, or to an habitual mode of thought 
and feeling that raises us above the plane of the psychical 
man, and which shall give them lordship over the senses and 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 81 

the body. But our deliverance is to be sought within our- 
selves. A right understanding of that remarkable saying of 
Jesus, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," will place 
all such persons in the " path." It is not the mere historic 
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, but the Christ in him, 
who here speaks. The Christ, as the indwelling Word, is 
the only principle and source of divine illumination and spir- 
itual intelligence. This is to be sought in the depths of our 
own inner being, for in us is the "Word of life and the Light 
of the world, and the onlv light that can be shed upon our 
path. If it cannot be discovered, or uncovered here, it can 
be found by us nowhere. Paul speaks of the great mystery, 
or hidden truth of the Gospel, and which had been concealed 
from the generations of the past ages, but which was then 
made known to men as Christ in you. the hope of glory, or 
as the ground of our exaltation to a state of inward illumi- 
nation, or a truly spiritual condition of our intellectual 
powers. The mystic brotherhoods of the past aud the pres- 
ent are only a dark lantern to the world. Christianity came 
to break the opaque envelope and let their imprisoned light 
out. He who has sought and found the Christ within, and 
has risen above the conception of him as an external, histor- 
ical person, and has identified his inmost self with him. is in 
the way to know all that was ever known of spiritual truth 
by the mind of man, for it is all there still. For in the Christ 
are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col. 
ii : 3.) He is on the threshold of becoming more than man, 
as Jesus did. He is about to realize the truth of the pas- 
sage. "I said ye are gods, and all of you are sons of the 
Most High," or the Divine Inmost. (Ps. lxxxii : 6. John 
x:31:.) The Christ in his fulness includes in himself the 
inmost degree of my own being. And it is this in me which 
ever affirms of itself I am, that is, the way and the truth, 
and the life. Hence savs the Christ, "If any man thirst 



82 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

(or desire spiritual truth) , let him come unto me (in thought) 
and drink, and the water that I shall give him shall be in 
him a fountain of water springing up into (and from) ever- 
lasting life." (John iv : 14.) The Christ within is the way, 
and the truth, and the life, all in one. He who has entered 
into the way will be gradually conducted to the end, for it 
will be the path of the just, that shineth more and more unto 
the perfect day. This end involves in it an intuitive percep- 
tion of the absolute unity of God, and that we are somehow 
included in that unit}'. For if Christ, as the manifested 
God, is the essential Truth and the essential Life, then it 
follows that so far as I am in these, I am in Christ, and 
Christ liveth in me. My being has become indissolubly in- 
volved in his ; my isolated selfhood, or proprium, has disap- 
peared and become united to the Supreme Self. When the 
sun rises, the dew-drop is taken up into a shining sea of 
light. It is not lost, not annihilated, bat glorified. 

When the Invisible God, the Supreme Divine Essence, as 
the Absolute Being, who is beyond the reach and grasp of 
thought, would pass outward into existence, or become mani- 
fested in creation, he goes forth in the form of man, which 
is a Divine Humanity, the Maximus Homo, or greatest man, 
the Adam Kadmon of the Kabala. In the Hindu theosophy, 
the Aditi, the boundless, becomes Viradj, the Divine Man. 
As Swedenborg affirms from an older philosophy, God is 
seen by the angels in a human form, which means human 
quality and not merely shape. Not that he is seen exter- 
nally, for nothing in heaven or earth is ever seen externally 
to the mind by men or angels. The pure in heart see God 
in themselves and as the real self. For in man the Invisible 
becomes visible, the Unknown becomes known, the Imper- 
sonal becomes personal, the Infinite becomes definite b}' self- 
limitation, and the Formless and Nameless takes form and 
name. Thus the highest expression and revelation of God 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 83 

is the inmost self of man. And this can always affirm, "I 
and my Father are one." 

Christ as the manifested God, the God-Man, is our inmost 
and verimost life. (Col. iii:4.) If we can find this, we 
can find him, and discover the point where our life blends 
with God's life — where the Divine becomes human, and 
the human, Divine. This inward Christ, when manifested 
in the flesh and dominating all the physiological organs and 
functions, is the Lord, who is the strength of our life aud 
the t; health of our countenance." (Ps. xlii : 11.) Christ 
is also made unto us wisdom or intuitive knowledge, and our 
wisdom is Christ, as its connection with him is never broken. 
He is our righteousness, our faith or spiritual truth. To be 
saved by faith is to be saved by Christ, for faith is the 
Christ in us. In being saved by faith from sin and disease, 
there is no miracle, but as the London Lancet has said, " it 
wouM be a miracle if, the organism being constituted as it 
is, and the laws of life such as they are, faith-healing, under 
favorable conditions, did not occur." Christ within is our 
sanctification and redemption. He is not merely our re- 
deemer, but our redemption itself. He is not merely a 
Savior or Health-Giver, as if he were a power outside of us 
who comes to our rescue, but he is our health and our salva- 
tion. His merit is our merit, as being a quality of the inner 
selfu'hich is inseparable from him. "We are not to view him 
as an historic person about whose life we read in the Gospel 
narratives, but as a universal divine-human principle, everJU- 
preseut in, and never absent from, the inner recesses of our 
being. 

We are to expunge from our minds the hurtful conception 
and sense of separateness, or the feeling of the isolation of 
the individual spirit from that universal Spirit of which it is 
a limitation. The inward man is an epitome of the Christ. 
For in man the manifested God divides himself without 
diminishing himself. 



84 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

In order to come into the closest union with God, we must 
be able to form in our minds the true idea of him. God is a 
Spirit, and our spirit is in the image and likeness of Gocl, or 
is the idea of God in us. That idea is my inner self, and it 
is also God in man. And things which are equal to the same 
thing are equal to one another. They who worship God must 
worship him in spirit (our own spirit) and in truth. (John 
iv:24.) To adore him under a false conception of him is 
to adore a false God, which is all the same as no God, for 
falsity is equivalent to nonentity. The ancients supposed the 
resemblance of a thing or being was animated by the life of 
that which it resembled, and as man is an express image of 
God, he is pervaded with a divine vitality. An image or 
statue of a man, as of a Washington or Lincoln, is an exter- 
nal expression of our idea of them ; and if it be a high work 
of art and a worthy resemblance, it seems as we look at it to 
be animated by them. On this subject a Hermetic volume, 
published in 1G50, says : " Those men who are skilled in the 
secrets of the theology of the ancients, assure us, that those 
who first set up images in their temples, resembling the 
shapes of angels that have appeared upon earth, had no 
other design in so doing, save only the more easily to invite 
down those blessed spirits by the force of the resemblance. 
And I know not whether or no, by the very same virtue of 
resemblance which is found betwixt God and man (faciamus 
kominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostrum) it hath not 
rightly been affirmed by some divines, that the Son of God 
would nevertheless have become man (yet without suffering 
death) though Adam had never fallen. But speaking of 
things as they are at present, Jesus Christ is found in the 
midst of those that speak with faith of his name ; because 
when we speak (or even think) with affection, of any one, we 
represent him to ourselves in our imagination (or in a living 
idea) . So true it is that resemblance hath the power to work 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 85 

wonders, even upon him that bath dependence upon no other, 
and is not under any power or law. But such conceptions as 
these are to be entertained with all piety, and proposed with 
such sanctity as becomes those who speak of so adorable a 
subject." 

But the " resemblance" that works the greatest wonders is 
not a material image that we make to represent the spirit of 
an angel or a mau. but the living image of him that arises 
in the mind when we interiorly think of him from a true 
knowledge of him. That image (or idea) is the real man 
himself, and is invested with all his qualities. It expresses 
and represents to us not only all that we ever knew of him, 
but all that he kuows and thinks, or ever thought. For what 
a man is in spirit is the sum of all that he ever thought ; and 
when we come into fellowship (or a state of community) with 
him, through the law of sympathy, his thoughts and feelings, 
that is, his life, may flow into us. It is all included in his 
idea or living self. This applies to communion with the 
manifested God, or the Christ. When we think of God, 
according to a law of our being, the thought takes form in 
an idea of him. This idea is God manifested in us, and is 
really what we are in our inmost nature. It is the Lord 
coming to personality in man. This vision of the Augoeides, 
or shining one, as it was called by philosopher initiates, is the 
revelation of our own inner self as the Lord Christ, and is 
the Beatific Vision of the "saints." Once enjoyed, its 
memorj^ never wholly fades from the mind. It is the glorifi- 
cation of our humanity, and the humanization of God as the 
Lord. Our individual self is not lost in an indefinable ' ' ocean 
of spirit," but is only enlarged by being incorporated into the 
Supreme Self. Our little isolated manhood grows into Christ- 
hood. And in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge, and there is no seal on this living book ; the seven 
seals are on men's hearts. When these are broken, and our 



86 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

minds become a peaceful vacancy to the influx of the celes- 
tial, the life, light, and love of the Christ flow in and fill the 
void. 

The spirit in man is born of God, and by a law of heredity 
it inherits the qualities of its parent' source. Being begotten 
in the image and likeness of God, and as a finite limitation 
of the divine substance, it is immortal in its essence and 
cannot be diseased or suffer. Of this inward self, Jesus 
says : " Call no man your father on the earth, for one is your 
Father, the heavenly." (Matt, xxiii : 9.) 

" Never the spirit was born ; the spirit shall cease to be never ; 

Never was time it was not; end and beginning are dreams! 
Birthless, and deathless, and changeless remaineth the spirit forever; 

Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems." 

(The Song Celestial. Arnold.) 

While the spirit is the Son of God, the lower soul is the 
son of man. In the progress of the evolutionary process the 
animal soul, or psychical man, is that which first comes into 
conscious activity, and has a dominating influence over the 
life. This is called the first man by Paul. The higher man 
is yet latent, and is the product of a later birth in us, the 
development of a higher region of our being. For " except 
a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of 
God" (John iii : 3), but remains blind to it, for the divinest 
moiety of human nature is unborn in him. The law of the 
unfoldment of our inner nature is expressed by Paul : " The 
first man, or Adam, becomes a living soul ; the last Adam is 
a life-giving spirit. Howbeit, that is not first which is spir- 
itual, but that which is natural (or psychical) ; then that 
which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy ; 
the second man is of heaven. And as we have borne the 
image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the 
heavenly." (1 Cor. xv : 45-49.) 

When in the progress of our development the spirit, which 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 87 

is the celestial man, is born into consciousness, and the inner 
self is revealed to us, we have found that which can always 
affirm and speak with authority for every department of our 
being, " I am not diseased nor unhappy nor sinful, for I and 
my Father are one." This is that supreme truth, the intuitive 
knowledge of which makes us free. Such a man, in the grand 
symbolism of the ancient sages, which in the overwhelming 
flood of materialism became a dead language to the world, 
was called an inhabitant of Zion, as mountains signified the 
celestial state of man on earth. In the descent of the human 
race from the spiritual to the sensuous and material plane of 
life it became necessary, in order to preserve the precious 
and priceless truths of the spirit, to inclose them in symbols 
addressed to sense. The symbol taken from nature would 
be as enduring as the pyramids. When, in a subsequent age, 
men should begin to be unfolded spiritually, the inner con- 
tent of the symbol would be disclosed. On the development 
of the intuition in us there is nothing hidden that may not 
be uncovered to the perception of the spirit. These sublime 
symbols with their celestial freight, and which men are just 
beginning to understand, have been an ark borne upon the 
waters of the flood, which has kept spiritual truth from utter 
extinction. In this sublime science of correspondence, Zion 
signifies the celestial or truly spiritual condition of man. 
And the inhabitant of Zion, or one in whom the recognition 
of the inner divine self has become an habitual mode of 
thought, no longer says, "I am sick." (Isa. xxxiii:24.) 
For he has discovered the Christ within as the immortal and 
incorruptible self, which is forever exempt from disease and 
death. The inward Christ, as the Crown, may sa}' to every 
one in the language of the king of Persia to ISTehemiah, 
" Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? this 
is nothing else but sorrow of heart." (Neh. ii:2.) And 
this sorrow, or mental inharmony which the world calls dis- 



88 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

ease, is only in the sensnons mind, a region of being that is 
far below the summit of Zion, the residence of the true self. 
Here man ceases from desire and finds rest. The unsatisfied 
desires of the selfish animal soul engender sorrow and pain 
and disease. This inward turbulence and disquiet translate 
themselves into a bodily expression. But when we discover 
the Christ within, we have quenched this trishna, or burning 
thirst, from springs that never dry. 

" Then all the jarring notes of life 

Seem blending in a psalm, 
And all the angles of its strife 

Slow rounding into calm." 

"The ransomed of the Lord return and come with singing 
unto Zion ; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads ; they 
shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall 
flee away." (Isa. xxxv : 10.) 

You will perceive, from the wording of the above beautiful 
passage, that the attainment of a state where sorrow and 
sighing, or that dissatisfied condition of the soul which is 
the essence of mental disease, shall flee away, and fall off 
from the inward man like raindrops from the leaves in a 
summer shower, is not a new creation in us, but a return to 
a state from which we have descended. It is a mistake to 
suppose that the life of the spirit, the real and immortal Ego, 
is measured by the brief span of a few revolving years on 
earth. According to the oldest spiritual philosophy, which 
has come down from an age when the " sun of righteousness " 
shone upon men without being obscured by the clouds of 
sense, our life here is but the bottom segment of a cycle or 
circle of existence. The life on earth, with its mixed joys 
and sorrows, pleasures and pains, is the lowest portion of the 
cycle. It is an adumbration and an eclipse of " that glory 
which we had with the Father before the world was " to us. 
Life here is at the furthest remove from its Divine Source. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. S9 

And our progressive regeneration is, in fact, the homeward- 
bound journey of the soul. As a planet when it reaches its 
aphelion, or point of greatest remoteness from the sun, in its 
elliptical orbit, begins to come back to its perihelion, or place 
of greatest nearness to the central and luminous world around 
which it revolves, so we commence our return to the realm 
of pure spirit (which is symbolically called Zion) when we 
discover and lament our remoteness from the Deific Centre 
of all existence, and the region that is the true home of our 
souls. Life is a stream which has its rise in the Mount of \ 
God, and the further it flows from its source, the more turbid [ 
its waters become. When we discover this great truth, and 
say, "I will arise and go to my Father," and turn about 
(which in the terminology of the New Testament is called 
conversion), the stream of our life is reversed, and begins to 
flow back towards its origin. To find the spiritual state for 
which we inwardly yearn, we are not to look forward and 
explore an unknown and unknowable future, for it is not 
there. We look in the wrong direction. However sharply 
we scrutinize the future, we shall miss the object of quest. 
We have already gone far enough in that direction. By an 
introversion of the mind we are to look back, and recover 
into consciousness our former spiritual state and pristine 
glory by recollection. In the inverted state of our powers 
and perceptions, what we call progress is really a return. 
This is the teaching of Plato, and also of Jesus. Retrogres- 
sion is the true advance. We believe this is a principle of 
supreme practical value, and shall return to it again in the 
following pages. Great prominence was given to that intro- 
version of mind, or turning of the mind inward upon itself, 
which was called recollection, by the mystics of the Middle 
Ages, who were only Christian Platonists. They did not 
seek to invent or create truth, but to recover it by memory. 
On an examination of a concordance of the Scriptures under 



90 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

the word remember and its derivatives, we shall be astonished 
to find how great a prominence was given to the memory in 
the evolution of the spiritual life, a principle which has been 
ignored in modern times. In the spirit of the old philosophy, 
we would say, " Remember, therefore, from whence thou art 
fallen, and repent and do the first works." (Rev. ii : 5.) 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 91 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE BREATH OF GOD IN MAN, OR THE TRUE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 

The "Unknown," the Divine Esse, or Absolute Being, 
has let himself clown from his inscrutable height which can- 
not be scaled by finite thought, by three degrees of mani- 
festation, and each successive stage of the revelation of 
himself is in itself, and taken by itself, a triad of principles, 
or a trinity in unity. The third is the Universal Life, a 
Divine Principle or primordial substance (not in a material, 
but in a metaphysical sense) . This is God as the intelligent 
Life of the world, and is called Adonai, or Lord. It may 
be viewed in thought, if you choose, as a person, for in 
the Oriental mind everything is personified. It is identical 
with the Hoby Spirit of the New Testament. It is the ulti- 
mate expression of the Christ or Manifested God. In the 
Kabala, the divine name which corresponds to the tenth 
Sephira, or emanative principle, and which represents the 
whole realm of actuality (or matter) is Adonai, who is the 
everywhere present and all-intelligent life-force in nature. 
In the grand econom}; of existence, or the manifestation of 
being, it is the function of this demiurgic, or world-building 
intellect, to translate pre-existing subjective ideas into actu- 
ality, or objective forms and material representations. This 
will render clear all that we may say hereafter. 

There are certain plants which live wholly from the air, 
and all plants do so more or less, as a geranium placed 
under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump will die. 
Every vital process is instantly suspended. Now air is the 
correspondent of the Holy Spirit. Wind, which is air in 



92 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

motion, or as force, is the representation of Spirit in action. 
Hence Jesus says, "The Spirit bloweth (or breatheth) 
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound of it, but canst 
not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth. So is every 
one who is born of the Spirit. (John iii:8.) As plants 
live mostly from the air, since their several tissues are but 
a condensation or crystallization (as it were) of the four 
principal gases, may not man as a physical being live from 
the Holy Spirit, the universal living energy and principle 
of life? All men do in fact so live, but may we not have 
this life more abundantly? 

There is a Universal Life Principle, which is the intelli- 
gent, animating force of the world and of the human body. 
It is in all things, and all things are in it. It has been 
recognized and worshipped under different names by the 
various nations of men in all ages, as a manifestation of 
God. Among the Greeks it was called Zeus (from £<xco, to 
live) and was identical with the Universal JEther, eliminat- 
ing from the word all material conceptions. Cicero speaks 
of Zeus as pater omnipotens ^Ether. Among the Hindus 
it is denominated Akasa, a reduplication of the word for 
life, and was the god-sky, not the visible, but invisible sky, 
and was considered by them as an everywhere present vivific 
principle and primal force. As the divine, operating pres- 
ence of God in the world and in man, it is called Adonai or 
Lord in the Old Testament. It is the anima mundi of 
Pythagoras and Plato, or the world-soul, sustaining to the 
material universe the same relation that the animal soul 
of man does to the human body. To learn how to invigo- 
rate, augment, and reinforce our individual and particular 
life from the Universal Life, our soul from the Universal 
Soul, is to find the true Elixir Vitse, one of the objects of 
quest among the Alchemists. Is it an impossible attain- 
ment? Swedenborg affirms and reiterates the assertion, 






AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 93 

that there is but one Life among angels and men, and that 
Life is the Lord, and that man is so made that he can 
appropriate to himself life from the Lord. We may live and 
grow as the flower imbibes the vivifying light and heat of 
the sun. The white lotus on the still lagoon, when the sun 
sets, contracts its stem and draws itself under water, as 
does our beautiful Nymphoea Odorata. When the sun rises, 
it comes to the surface, expands its closed, petals, and opens 
itself to receive the solar light and life. Let us behold the 
lilies of the field,- how they grow, and imitate them. The 
selfhood or proprium of man, that which we call our own, 
is only a capacity, a capability of receiving, a subjective 
possibility of existence. The divinely intelligent world- 
soul — call it the Lord, the AJmsa, the Holy Spirit, or by 
whatever name you please to give it, or let it be nameless, 
— is always inclined to heal the hurts of every living thing. 
We have a favorite dog who received a severe gun-shot 
wound. For two days he lay as if asleep. He did nothing, 
and nothing was done for him. In three days he had recov- 
ered. Who cured the dog? A valuable cherry-tree on our 
grounds was badly injured by a fractious horse backing a 
loaded wagon against it. A cotton bandage was placed 
over the wound by one of our patients. In a year it was 
removed, and the wound was healed. Who healed the tree? 
A mussel with one valve accidentally broken into a dozen 
fragments was returned to his sandy bed on the banks of 
the Merrimac, and in a brief time the shell was artistically 
mended ; the wound was healed with no signs of the injury 
left but the scars. Who and what healed the clam? He 
only lay still in the sand, and was healed by him who feeds 
the young ravens when they cry, and cares for the sparrows, 
and who perpetually endeavors to realize the Divine idea of 
things in nature. It is a divine essence and can never be 
diseased or die ; only its manifestations can be disorderly. 



94 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

As an ultimate expression of the life of the Christ, it 
healeth all our diseases, and redeemeth our life from de- 
struction, so that our youth is renewed like the eagle's. 
(Ps. ciii : 1-5.) 

The reception of this animating and saving principle is by 
influx according to a law of correspondence, as the Hermetic 
philosophers of all lands have received knowledge. As God 
and nature abhor a vacuum, if we approach the Lord of life 
in a spirit of emptiness or true spiritual poverty, he will fill 
our needs from his illimitable fulness. The most effectual 
prayer is wordless — the turning of a soul, conscious of its 
emptiness towards the boundless Life of the heavens and of 
nature. For there is but one Lord, and the same Lord is 
the Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon him, 
whether it be the wounded animal whose passive silence is 
as eloquent as the strains of an archangel, or the ejaculation 
of the humble publican outside of the temple. (Rom. x : 
12.) Man's life is not self-originated or generated within 
the limits of his physical organism, but is perpetually 
imparted from the Lord. There is but one Life, one Love, 
one Intelligence, and one Power or Force. All finite, indi- 
vidual life is a manifestation of the one Life ; all love is an 
exhibition of the supreme Love ; all intelligence, in plants, 
animals, men, and angels is a ray of the infinite Intelli- 
gence ; and all strength is an expression of the one Force, 
for all power is of God. (Rom. xiii:l.) (Disease is aj 
state of weakness, an infirmity, because it is a condition! 
where by a wrong way of thinking we come into a feeling of 
isolation from the Lord; but "blessed (or happy) is the 1 
man whose strength is in thee." (Ps. lxxxiv : 5.) Strength 
, is a purely mental state and mental energy, as much so as 
\_faith and hope. We are to banish from our minds the 
deeply rooted illusion of physical strength and bodily weak- 
ness, f The mental force that we call strength can be re- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 95 

ceived by influx from the Lord. " They that wait upon the 
Lord shall renew their strength/' (Isa. xl : 31.) 

In the Old Testament Scriptures one of the designations 
of the universal Life-Principle, or the Holy Spirit, is " the 
breath of God." In Paul's oration before the Areopagus he 
affirms that the nameless Deity to whose worship he found 
an altar dedicated in Athens, and who is not far from every 
one of us, is he who giveth life and breath and all things. 
(Acts xvii:25.) The same forgotten truth is taught in 
that ancient mystic poem, the Book of Job. In speaking 
Of the Supreme Being he says : " In whose hand is the soul 
of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind." (Job 
xii: 10.) Again, "The Spirit of God hath made me, and 
the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." (Job xxx : 4.) 
In another place he says, "By the breath of God frost is 
given." (Job xxxvii : 10.) We are to bear in mind that 
the Universal Life-Principle is called in the Scriptures the 
breath of God. And every frost crystal, with its intelligent 
geometrical forms, with the angles made by its rays all 
exactly of sixty degrees, is the result of the action of an 
everywhere present, living energy, as much so as all the 
myriad forms of vegetable and animal organization. All 
phenomena are the expression of life. By our breathing we 
are connected with the Universal Life- Principle. At that 
point my particular life meets and mingles with the One Life. 
This gives an importance to respiration that few have 
noticed. As Dr. Wilkinson has eloquently said, "In the 
running wheel of life the imperceptible motion at the axle 
is thought ; the sweep at the periphery is respiration." (The 
Human Body and its Connection with 3fan, p. 59.) Eight 
thinking and right breathing are the two things most essen- 
tial to happiness and health. Our modes of thought and 
feeling are ultimated in the body through the respiration. 
Every mental state has a respiration answering to it. Take 



1)6 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

as an illustration the mental act of listening to catch a faint 
and distant sound. It suspends the breathing. You eau- 
not listen and breathe deep and full. The instant you do 
this, you stop listening. The same is true of melancholy. 
It stops the machinery of life by suspending the respiration. 
So of all our varying mental states. They record them- 
selves on the Universal Life-Principle, and through this in 
a respiratory movement peculiar to them. Tell a young lad 
that he cannot lift a rock that lies before him, and if he 
accepts your challenge, he instinctively assumes an erect 
attitude, the posture of the "upright" man, takes a full 
breath, and triumphantly raises the rock. There is a prac- 
tical and profound philosophy in what he does. He first 
forms the idea of strength. He then ultimates it in a bodily 
attitude, and translates the idea into a form of respiration 
that belongs to it, and through this it becomes a vigorous 
muscular contraction. In a similar way, any desirable men- 
tal state of which we can form an idea may be ultimated 
in the life. The first act of conscious life was respiration, 
and it will be the last. All our sense-consciousness com- 
menced with it, and is coeval and coexistent with it through- 
out the whole cycle of our earthly existence. As Mrs. 
Browning has said, "He lives most life whoever breathes 
most air." 

But we ask, What is the connection of our respiration 
with the Universal Life-Principle, called the breath of God? 
In answering this query, we remark that all motion in the 
universe is rhythmical, as Herbert Spencer has shown in his 
First Principles of Philosophy. This is seen in the for- 
ward and backward movement of the pendulum, the ebb and 
flow of the tides, the succession of day and night, the systolic 
and diastolic action of the heart, and in the inspiration and 
expiration of the lungs. Our breathing is a double motion 
of the universal aether, an active and a reactive movement. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 97 

This androgyne principle, -with its dual motion, is the breath 
of life, the breath of God in man. When we breathe in 
harmony with this movement, we are well, and our individ- 
ual life marches forward in exact step with the tranquil life 
of nature ; when our respiration is discordant with it, our 
life-force is out of tune. We are a discord in the divine song 
of creation. Says Herbert Spencer in the Popular Science 
Monthly for January, 1884: "Amid the mysteries that be- 
come the more mysterious the more they are thought about, 
there will remain the one absolute certainty, that we are 
ever in the presence of an infinite and an eternal energy, 
from which all things proceed." With this grand confession 
of faith, he takes his place in the ranks of an ever-growing 
number of scientific theists. The Universal JEther of the 
Hermetic philosophy, the Adonai of the Kabala, the Holy 
Spirit, the Anima Mundi, the IVelt-geist, is an infinite, eter- 
nal, and living and life-giving energy, in the midst of which 
we ever are, and from whose presence we can never escape. 
(Ps. cxxxix : 7-10.) And it is its presence which is a never- 
ceasing outgoing from God, with its self-moving dual action, 
and double motion, that gives the breath of life. It breathes 
in and for us when we retire from the physiological machine, 
as in sleep, and whenever our breathing is automatic and 
involuntary. Then our respiratory movements arise out of 
that mysterious, universal, and eternal (but to materialistic 
science inexplicable) vital impulse that lies at the root of all 
the manifestations of life in the universe. The nearer we 
can assume toward it in our wakeful hours the passive atti- 
tude of sleep, as in the case of the wounded dog mentioned 
above, the more it can and will do for us. We need to learn 
the lesson of trust so beautifully expressed by Whittier. 

"Kocked on her breast, these pines and I 
Alike on Nature *s love rely ; 
And equal seems to live or die. 



98 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

" Assured that he whose presence fills 
With light the spaces of these hills 
No evil to his creatures wills, 

" The simple faith remains, that He 
"Will do, whatever that may be, 
The best alike for man and tree. 

What mosses over one shall grow, 
What light and life the other know, 
Unanxious, leaving Him to show." 

The action of this universal curative principle may be mod- 
ified by the will, faith, and imagination of mau, and its 
operation accelerated in the divine curative or saving process. 
The Holy Spirit of the New Testament is a " divine proceed- 
ing," as Swedenborg denominates it; or, in other words, an 
emanative principle from God, and one which is the operative 
energy of God in nature and in man. Among other mani- 
festations of its presence and agency, it is that which is the 
principle of respiration, and this movement thus springs out 
of the universal Life. It is, as we have before said, the pri- 
mary movement, and that from which all others arise and on 
which they depend. It modifies and controls all the other 
physiological movements. Paul affirms that our body is a 
temple of the Holy Spirit, which is in us, and which we have 
from God. Therefore we should glorify God (or think 
rightly of him) in our body. (1 Cor. vi : 19, 20.) As the 
Holy Spirit is the only life of our bod}*, it surely ought not to 
be difficult to think that it is never sick or sinful. We may be 
affected by the " world," or that current of thought and feel- 
ing in societ}* around us, which is the antagonist of the true 
spiritual life. 

But the Holy Spirit is what Jesus denominates it, to 7rvev;xa 
to aytov, the unearthly spirit, or the purely divine life- 
principle uncontaminated by the disorderly life of the world. 
It is that by which and in which God is present in the world 






AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 99 

and in man. It is also that medium or vehicle through which 
and in which the risen and glorified Jesus can come to his 
disciples or scholars. It is the principle of presence of one 
spirit with another. Through it Jesus comes to his true fol- 
lowers as the Lord Christ, the Master or Teacher divinely 
illuminated, the Paraclete or spirit of truth, to teach us all 
things, to guide us into all truth, and recall forgotten spirit- 
ual verities to our recollection. (John xiv:2G.) It is a 
mistake to suppose that Jesus has ever left the world. He 
declared to his disciples, " I will not leave you desolate (or 
orphans) ; I come to you." (John xiv : 18.) " Lo, I am with 
you always, even unto the consummation of the age." (Matt. 
xxviii : 20.) In his ascension to the purely spiritual plane of 
life, a cloud received him out of sight ; but the cloud was 
not in the upper atmosphere, but was a cloud of sensuality in 
the minds of men. He disappeared from vision by the 
closure of the inner senses of men. And this same Jesus, 
whom we have thus seen go into heaven, shall in like manner 
return as we have seen him go into heaven. (Acts i : 9-11.) 
He disappeared from men by the closing of their spiritual 
vision. He comes to men by the rending of Cie veil of sense 
and the opening of the eyes of the understanding. In our 
mental and physical maladies there is help at hand, for Jesus 
who is not far off in the immeasurable depths of space, but 
still in the world he loves, comes to men to breathe into them 
the quickening spirit. And through the everywhere present 
medium of the Universal Life, the Holy Spirit, saving truth 
may be communicated by him, and healing impressions may 
be fastened upon the minds of men, as easily and as naturally 
as an electric force is conveyed through the wire, or a sound 
impulse through the telephone. Psychological effects can be 
produced, and thoughts and ideas communicated from 
mind to mind, in this world or the realm above, without the 
intervention of an}- material apparatus or conducting wires, 



100 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

by thought infused into and impressed upon the invisible 
world-spirit, the Divine JEther. 

The Holy Spirit is the I Am of our soul-life and physical 
force. In and of itself it is (so to speak) a formless sub- 
stance of life. It is for us to name it, and the name we give 
it, it takes, and in that quality we may appropriate it and 
breathe it in. The very word for soul (psyche) comes from 
a Greek verb meaning to breathe. For by our breath we are 
connected with the universal life-principle, and our soul is a 
finite limitation of it. But it takes quality from our fixed 
modes of thought and confirmed beliefs. If these are illu- 
sions, and the acceptance as realities of false appearances, 
the physical organism will become their outward expression. 
If we form the true idea of ourself, and tranquilly hold to it, 
the Holy Spirit will translate the divine idea into a bodily 
representation ; for as we have before said, the office of the 
Holy Spirit is to give material form and actuality to sub- 
jective ideas. 

The Holy Spirit is the medium or vehicle thfough which spir- 
itual blessings come to us from the ' ' Father," and from the high- 
est realm of existence. The promise is, " Ask, and it shall 
be given " ; and what we ask, which is an aspiration or 
breathing out of the soul into the all-surrounding Life, is re- 
turned to us as an inspiration or inbreathing. That of which 
we form a conception and which we desire, becomes a 
reality, a living thing in the universal life-principle, one of 
the occult properties of which is reaction, and what we thus 
ask is reflected back to us somewhat as a sound is returned 
in an echo through the aether, which is the medium of the 
transmission of sound ; or as an empty bucket comes back 
from the well, filled with water, which takes the form of the 
vessel that contains it. Thus as Jesus teaches in the Gospel 
of Luke the Essene, "If a child ask bread, his father does 
not give him a stone ; or if he asks for a fish, he does not give 






AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 101 

him a serpent ; or if he asks for an egg, he does not give him 
a scorpion. If we then being evil know how to give good 
gifts to our children, how much more shall our heavenly 
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him." (Luke 
xi : 9-13.) And it will take the form, or quality, that is the 
object of thought and desire in the request, and this by a 
profound law of our being. The Holy Spirit is a universal 
Proteus, which like that marine deity, or divine principle in 
nature, has the property of taking the shape of our desires 
and thoughts. True prayer is aspiration, or the soul breath- 
ing after a thing, and its answer is an inbreathing, as the 
nursing of a child is only a modified respiration. This uni- 
versal divine Soul of the Universe is to us what we make it 
Irv our confirmed mode of thinking and believing. The high- 
est ideal that we can form of existence on earth is the per- 
petual vigor of youth combined with the wisdom of age. 
Whatever is conceivable by the mind of man is possible. 
The first step towards the realization of that divine idea of 
man is the conception (or begetting) of it in our minds and 
the belief of its attainableness. We then remove it from the 
category of impossible things, and plant the liviug seed of it 
in our souls, and the Holy Spirit will preside over its devel- 
opment into actuality in ourselves and others. For we affirm 
again, it is the function of the Holy Spirit to give an ultimate 
or material expression to divine ideas. If there was on 
earth among men a higher idea of man, we should have a 
higher race of men. 

The question was put to Jesus by those who witnessed his 
marvellous cures. " What must we do that we may work the 
works of God?" His reply, when fully comprehended, 
solves the mystery of a true theurgy, and reveals one of the 
fundamental principles of the ancient occult spiritual philos- 
ophy in its application to the cure of the sick and sinful by 
psychological impression. "This is the work of God, that 



102 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

3'e believe oo that which he hath sent." (John vi : 28, 29.) 
By the sent of God is not signified any mere historic person, 
but that which emanates or proceeds from God, and which 
is his representative in nature, and that which manifests him 
in the world. He who would work the works of God, or do 
the things that lie beyond the common doings of men, must 
say in the language of the Apostle's creed, but with a deeper 
meaning than is usually given to the words, " I believe in 
the Holy Ghost " ; not merely in the teaching of the popular 
theology in regard to him, but as possessing a fuller knowl- 
edge of his nature and functions. This divine life and 
force in nature comes to the aid of him who can think and 
act on the spiritual plane of his being. He who fully believes 
in it, comes to an interior cognition of it, and becomes one 
with it. It is a "Spirit of truth," which the world cannot 
receive, because it seeth it not by the senses, neither knoweth 
it. "But ye know him," says Jesus to his disciples, "for he 
dwelleth with you and shall be in you." (John xiv : 17.) 
If we come into sympathy with the life of nature and its 
Universal Soul, we can, by the power of our minds when 
acting above the plane of sense, intensify its saving energy, 
and direct it to the cure of disease. Jesus sent the Hoh T 
Spirit in his name, or in the healing quality and virtue which 
the sphere of his life gave to it, and which is signified by his 
name. Is it not possible for us in this day to do, in some 
measure at least, what he did? He says, in immediate 
connection with this subject, " Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do 
also ; and greater works than these shall he do ; because I 
go unto my Father." (John xiv : 12.) In the apostolic age 
the Holy Spirit was communicated by the imposition of the 
hands. It is a doctrine of Christianity that has been buried 
out of sight by the Church beneath its accumulated theologi- 
cal rubbish, and the debris of the primitive system, that 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 103 

when a man is in a state of spiritual impletion, or is 
surcharged with the life, light, and power of the Spirit, 
he ma}- impart it to others as a divine illuminating and 
healing virtue. This may be done by the power of the right 
word, by a phsychological impression and thought impulse, 
by a strong will and determined imagination, and by 
the imposition of the hands. (See Acts viii : 14-24; 
xix:l-7.) When we have accumulated the divine life of 
nature into ourselves, and possess it in an overflowing 
fulness, our surplusage of spiritual life and mental healthful- 
ness is given us to be imparted to others to supply their 
lack and fill their emptiness, just as a thousand smoking 
wicks may be lighted from one well-trimmed and well-filled 
lamp without diminishing its own flame. There are thousands 
of invalids who need this, and are saying in their hearts, if 
not with their lips, " Give us of your oil, for our torches are 
going out." By communicating to them the Holy Spirit, we 
put them in contact with the Universal Life, where they may 
buy for themselves, and thus become divinely self-reliant. 
The Holy Spirit, as an emanation from God, is the true 
Bethesda and pool of Siloam, which is by interpretation, the 
Sent. Whoever steps into this pool is healed of whatsoever 
disease he has. 

In the earlier and purer philosophy of Buddhism it was 
taught that the Akasa contained a permanent record of all 
that was ever thought, felt, said, or done. These arc all 
preserved in that universal principle as in " a book of life," 
or living book. All our states of thought and emotion exist 
in it, and can never have existence outside of it. There is 
in man a potential capacity to read the record. What we 
call memory is the recalling into consciousness of things that 
are connected with our personal existence. On the develop- 
ment of the intuition in us we can read the general record, 
and man is capable of knowing all that was ever known, and 



104 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

of feeling all that was ever felt. Education was supposed to 
be what the word radically signifies, the recalling of truths 
and states that belonged to a former and higher existence of 
man. Such was the doctrine of Plato. However that may 
be, all our higher and better experiences from infancy- to age 
have a present existence in the Akasa ; or, to use the term 
employed by Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, and through this 
medium nm/v be revived into present consciousness in us. 
The Holy Spirit is given to call all things to our remembrance 
that Jesus has said to the world. (John xiv : 26.) Forgot- 
ten truths are again revealed to us. So all our past joys and 
peaceful states, and youthful innocence, strength, and bliss, 
still exist in the universal life, and through the Holy Spirit 
may be revived into a present conscious perception. Memory/^ 
exists only in this universal divine principle, and has a 
deeper and wider significance than is usually given to it in 
our modern systems of philosophy. It is the golden link 
which unites the past with the present and the future. The 
Holy Spirit is the ark that carries all sacred truths and good 
affections across the flood from the past into the eternal now. 
The happy emotions and innocent joys of childhood are not 
lost out of the general Life, nor out of our individual being. 
Youthfulness, which is only adolescence or intellectual and 
spiritual growth, is not an irrecoverable state. Perpetual 
youth is a conceivable and consequently a possible condition. 
As our spirit is included in the Christ, and is complete in 
him who is the head of all principality and power, so also 
our soul-life, with all its happy emotions, past and present, 
is preserved to us in the Holy Spirit. All that we ever 
enjoyed may come back to us, and with increase. Nothing 
that is good and true ever perishes ; the evil and the false, , 
not having the divine life in them, are evanescent.. They are 
blotted out from the book of the living memory. The 
excellent is alone the permanent. That which is not, never 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 105 

will be ; that which really is, will Dever cease to be. Our 
youthful states of healthful vigor, and the blessedness of our 
early life, which sometimes gleam transiently into our con- 
sciousness, like a star looking from behind a cloud, are not 
annihilated. They are like flowers that close at night. 
When the sun of righteousness arises within us, they will 
open again. 

" On the heaven heights of Truth 
The true soul keeps its youth." 

In all the darkness, trials, sorrows, and diseases of life it 
may be made certain to our faith that our joys, and the 
blessedness of former days, are not lost out of our inner 
being. They are there as a priceless remnant that the 
Universal Life has treasured up and will restore. (Isa. i : 9.) 
When the Lord turns our captivity, and we emerge from our 
states of vastation and trial, and the deaths and hells through 
which the way to "glory" sometimes lies, the experience of 
Job may be ours. The Lord gave to Job twice as much as 
he had before, and his latter days were more blessed than 
the beginning. (Job xlii : 10-12.) 

[/Hie ancient poem, called the Book of Job, is not histori- 
cal ; but in it is given under symbolic representations the 
inner history of the soul, its pristine glory and descent into 
matter, and its return to its first estate.^ The latter day of 
prosperity, with its multiplied possessions, was only the com- 
ing round and development into conscious recollection of a 
former state of existence, with all the additions of good and 
truth which had been gathered up into the soul's life by its 
subsequent experiences. •' The "wheel of life" in its revolu- 
tion had returned the soul to the spiritual state whence it 
had started, and it had carried back with it the results of all 
the temptations and trials of its earthly existence.^ The 
same great spiritual law is stated by Paul, when he says : 
" Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for 



ICG ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory, 
while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the 
things which are not seen (by sense) ; for the things which 
are seen are temporal ; but the things which are not seen are 
eternal." (1 Cor. iv : 17, 18.) In the original we have one 
of the strongest expressions in human language to give us a 
conception of that increment of good that comes to the soul 
as the result of the trials of its earth-life, and one which 
it is impossible to translate without a circumlocution. For 
" more and more exceeding^ " we have, in the Greek KaO' 
virepftzXriv els virepftoXty, — with hyperbole upon hyperbole. 
The figure of speech, called in rhetoric an hyperbole, is an 
extravagant exaggeration, as when we speak of a flood of 
tears. But, according to Paul, we may place hyperbole upon 
hyperbole, like Pelium upon Ossa, and Ossa upon Olympus, 
and you fail to measure and weigh by words that weight of 
glory (or spiritual illumination and enduring good) which 
will result from the trials of our earthly existence. What 
we mourn as the evils of our lot, influenced in our judgment 
b}' the illusions of sense, are our highest inheritance of good. 
The tears we sow will spring up and mature into a golden 
harvest, which in due time we shall reap and garner up 
among our eternal treasures. When we can see through the 
opening clouds of sense the glimmering light of these great 
truths, we shall no longer call good evil, nor evil, good. 

Then 

" Life's burdens fall, its discords cease, 
I lapse into the glad release 
Of Nature's own exceeding peace. 

" 0, welcome calm of heart and mind ! 
As falls yon fir-tree's loosened rind 
To leave a tenderer growth behind, 

" So fall the weary years away : 
A child again, my head I lay 
Upon the lap of this sweet day." 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 107 



CHAPTER IX. 

PAIN AND ITS MENTAL CONQUEST. 

It appears from the sayings of Jesus, that he possessed 
the keys of death and Hades, or that he had attained to a 
perfect control of the life of the body, so that death was a 
voluntary surrender on his part, and not a conquest. He 
says: u Therefore does my Father love me, because I lay 
down (or give up) my life, that I may take it again. No 
one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down myself. I 
have power to lay it down, and "I have power to take it 
again. This commandment (or instruction) received I from 
my Father." (John x: 17, 18.) To some extent, at least, 
if not in the fulness of the power possessed by Jesus, it is 
an attainable condition — far more so than the world at large 
has been educated to believe. There have been men in the 
world who have possessed the control of the life of the body 
to such a degree that they lived as long as they desired to 
live. Death had no more a dominion over them, for they 
were not under law, that is, the controlling influence of pub- 
lic opinion, but under grace, or the hidden spiritual wisdom. 
(Rom. vi : 8-14.) This control of the life of the body was 
one of the objects of quest by the Alchemists, and it is be- 
lieved that some of them attained to it. And there are 
intelligent people who believe that there are to-day men on 
earth, the years of whose life are very far from being bounded 
by a single centmy. In reference to this we neither affirm 
nor deny. Before we wholly reject it as absurd, incredible, 
and impossible, we do well to pause and ask, Is it in har- 
mony with the teaching of Jesus and of Christianity? Is 
man's present condition the utmost limit of his powers? Has 



108 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

human nature attained to its full spiritual growth? If there 
are any une vol ved possibilities in man, then we may rise to 
and briug forth something higher. A brief half-century 
ago few would have deemed it possible that two men could 
intelligibly communicate with each other across the Atlantic 
Ocean, or talk with each other a hundred miles apart, for 
such an achievement would have been considered as impossi- 
ble as to fly to the moon. 

Life is manifested on three distinct or discrete planes of 
existence ; and the higher, in accordance with the divine 
order, may govern the lower. It is a law of our being, es- 
tablished and perpetuated by an everywhere present Deity, 
that spirit should dominate all the physical functions. Jesus 
affirms, " He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 
(John xi:26.) Again, "He who believeth on the Son 
(which includes our own inward divine spirit) hath everlast- 
ing life," as a present attainment. (John iii : 16.) These 
and similar passages manifestly mean more than the popular 
religion of the day finds in them. It is predicted by the best 
of the Jewish prophets that in the Messianic age that was 
to be born, the life of man would be greatly prolonged, "for 
as the days of a tree shall be the days of my people." (Isa. 
lxv : 20-22.) But it is our purpose to speak more particu- 
larly of pain and its mental remedy. 

In that higher condition of man, which is called the new 
heavens and the new earth, and which is nothing but the 
attainment of a truly spiritual and celestial state, and its 
ultimate expression in the body, it is said there shall be no 
more pain. (Rev. xxi : 4.) Pain and disease are the result 
of the fall of man, or the lapse of humanity from the plane 
of the spiritual life to a state of bondage to matter and the 
lower senses ; and the cure must consist in the surrender of 1 
the lower animal soul to the rightful dominion of the spirit, 
the Christ within, who must be allowed to reign in us until 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 109 

every enemy is put under his feet ; and the last enemy that 
shall be destroyed is death. When we attain the true 
Christian position of thought, and deatli becomes trans- 
formed into resurrection, or the ascent of the soul to a new 
and higher life on earth, then pain and disease disappear 
from consciousness. The soul is, as it were, separated from 
the bod}* ; that is, it is freed from the limitations of matter 
and released from its corporeal dungeon. When the Christ 
within us, the immortal and divine spirit in us, sheds its 
living radiance upon all the lower or outer departments of 
our being, then the immortal life animates our clay, and the 
vivifying breath of God moves the physiological machiaery 
in harmony with all that is divine in nature. This is the 
coming of the Christ in the flesh, and in our flesh. It is the 
Lord, the One Life, and •' one thing needful." coming to 
his temple, a purified human body, and coming the prisoner 
to release long held in the bondage of matter, and to open 
the prison to all that within us which is bound. It is the 
advent of the Logos, the inner and living Word, the true 
light that lighteth every man that coraeth into the world, 
and this light is the life of man ; and this Word is made 
flesh, or is intimated in a bodily expression in harmony with 
it, and dwells in us, which is the true rendering, not among 
us, as if it was something outside of us and foreign to our 
true being. (John i : 14.) In this resurrection day, the real 
man, the immortal self, comes forth from the sepulchre of 
the body, and lives eternal life while on earth. 

The various anaesthetics afford insensibility to the pains of 
disease and of surgical operations, by temporarily releasing 
the soul from the body, a condition of existence which is 
attainable as a philosophical and religious state without the 
use of drugs, as the Hindu Soma drink, or the more modern 
nitrous oxide. Says Sir Humpm*}' Davy, the English 
chemist, in describing his sensations after inhaling the gas : 



110 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

" I began to respire twenty quarts of uumingled nitrous 
oxide. A thrilling extending from the chest to the extremi- 
ties was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of 
tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb ; my 
visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified ; 
I heard distinctly every sound in the room, and was perfectly 
aware of my situation. By degrees, as the pleasurable sen- 
sations increased, I lost all connection with external things ; 
trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my 
mind, and were connected with words in such a manner as 
to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world 
of newly-connected and newly -modified ideas. I theorized, 
I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened 
from this semi-delirious trance by Dr. Kinglake, who took 
the bag from my mouth, indignation and pride were the first 
feelings produced by the sight of the persons about me. 
My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime ; and for a 
minute I walked around the room, perfectly regardless of 
what was said to me. As I recovered my former state 
of mind I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I 
had made during the experiment. I endeavored to recall 
the ideas ; they were feeble and indistinct ; one collection of 
terms, however, presented itself; and with the most intense 
belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr. Kinglake, 
' Nothing exists but tJioughts! The universe is composed of 
impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains ! ' About three 
minutes and a half only had elapsed during this experiment, 
though the time, as measured by the relative vividness of the 
collected ideas, appeared to me much longer." 

This emancipation of the soul from the limitations of the 
bod}', and the bondage of the inner man to the external 
senses, which gives us the mastery of pain and disease, 
effected in an abnormal way by the use of anaesthetics, and 
which transformed the materialistic scientist and chemist 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. Ill 

into an idealistic philosopher temporarily, is a state into 
which mankind can be educated or developed. It is among 
the unevolved potentialities of our nature. It is a perma- 
nent, religious, and philosophical state which has been real- 
ized in the experience of the few, who have appeared 
occasionally along the path of human history as pioneers 
and heralds of a better day for the world. They are signals 
sparsely set along the battlements of heaven, flashing into 
the solid darkness of the world, the good news, "the king- 
dom of the heavens is at hand." This state of emancipation 
from the body, and the deceptive and erroneous appearances 
and illusions of the senses, is the same as the Neo-Platonic 
ecstasy, which was deemed necessary to the attainment of 
the highest philosophical and spiritual altitude of thought 
and life. Our bondage to the animal senses, which is the 
taste of that forbidden tree that brought death and disease 
and pain and all our woe into the world, is an inverted, un- 
natural — and may we not say, ungodly? — condition. And 
who shall deliver us from "the body of this death"? In 
the language of Paul, who found the way, "I thank God, 
through our Lord Jesus Christ," who is within us as the hid- 
den centre of our being. Pain and disease are not necessi- 
ties of our earthly existence. There is a way out. He who 
has found the Christ within, his own immortal spirit, an 
emanation from the supreme and universal Spirit, and which 
partakes of all the attributes and perfections of its parent 
Source, can say : "I am the first and the last, and the One 
who lives ; and I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever- 
more, and I have the keys of death and Hades," to open the 
door and walk out into God's great sunlight. (Eev. i: 17, 
18.) The present movement of the public mind in the direc- 
tion of the cure of disease and sin (in the Platonic sense of 
an error of the understanding) must be received by all think- 
ing people as one of the most important movements in phil- 



112 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

osophy and religion which modern history has been called upon 
to record. It is the first feeble shaking of the dry bones of 
the past Golden Age of the world, buried beneath the sensu- 
ous materialistic science of modern times, and which is now 
struggling into a resurrection. I discover in it the pulse- 
beats of a higher life in humanity. Like primitive Christian- 
ity, there will be much that will try to fasten itself upon it 
that has no vital connection with it, and it will be opposed 
by the modern scribes, or " letter-men" of the law, and by 
a narrow, Pharisaic bigotry, and even Herod may seek to 
slay the young child, but nevertheless the infant is fully 
born, like Minerva or wisdom, from the brain of Jupiter, 
and the child will increase in wisdom and stature, and in 
favor with God and men. But let us bear in mind that the 
movement, if it signifies anything of a permanent value to 
the world, means a higher development of the spiritual life 
of man. It is only in this way that we can ever hope to 
attain to the mastery of pain and disease by the mind (or 
thinking principle), in the dethronement of the bodily 
senses, and the establishment of the empire of the spirit in 
us, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all other 
dominions must serve and obey it. The overthrow of the 
44 fourth kingdom" of Daniel, the " iron age" of Greek 
and Roman mythology, and which marks the reign in us of 
materialism and sensualism in religion and science, is ac- 
complished by the "mystic stone" cut without hands from 
the mountain, — the symbol of the celestial degree of life, — 
and which is identical with the " white stone" of the Apo- 
calypse, and the "philosopher's stone" of the Alchemists, 
and this, as Trithemius affirms, is none other than our own 
immortal and divine spirit. In the language of Paul, when 
correctly rendered, "Great is the mystery of godliness which 
is manifested in the flesh." (1 Tim. iii : 16.) 

In an old definition of pain, which dates as far back as 
Aristotle, and which has been reproduced by Sir William 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 113 

Hamilton, and adopted into bis metaphysical system, we 
have a hint for the application of what will prove in very 
many cases an infallible remedy for it. and one of which we 
should never lose sight. It is a remedy we shall have fre- 
quent occasion to prescribe for ourselves and others. Says 
Hamilton: "Pleasure is a reflex (that is, effect, result) of 
the spontaneous and unimpeded exertion of a power of which 
we are conscious ; pain, a reflex of the overstrained or 
repressed exertion of such a power." {Lectures on Meta- 
physics, p. 577.) Here is a golden truth of great practical 
value. If we substitute for pleasure and pain the words 
health and disease, it is equally true. Most diseases and 
painful affections, so far as they have become a condition of 
the physical organism, are a stasis or standing still of the 
circulation both of the blood and of the soul-principle through 
the parts. To put any organ, or muscle, as an arm or a leg, 
to its legitimate (not overstrained) use, is alvrays pleasur- 
able and healthful. Most diseases are the result of a 
repressed or obstructed activity of some part of the body. 
To find out the divinest use of any power of mind or body, 
and to put it to that use, is the law of its health and the 
sovereign remedj' for its disease. Take as an illustration, 
the lameness and soreness of the muscles of the arm, espe- 
cially the Deltoid muscle, whose office is to raise the arm. 
The pain here is only a crying out of the part for more blood, 
more soul-life. Each successive time the arm is slowly 
raised, the pain is less and less, until at length it wholly 
disappears. The same is true of that most painful disease, 
acute or chronic inflammation of the sciatic nerve, or the 
ordinary forms of rheumatism. In the former case, the sci- 
atic nerve, one of the largest in the body, has become 
" strangulated," as some medical author expresses it. It 
cries out for more of the soul-life in it. Gently move it a 
few times, and then. "Arise, take up thy bed, and walk." 



114 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

Soreness and pain in a part of the body, to speak after the 
manner of men, are only the same thing in different degrees, 
— a want of life in the part. And the voluntary movement 
of a part determines the vital force to the part moved. A 
weak muscle is always sore. Action is the law of life, and 
consequently of health. Inaction is first pain, and then 
death. He who fully comprehends this principle, and can 
bring the patient to a practical application of it, will be a 
successful physician ; for the cure of disease is only the 
restoration of the organs involved in it to their legitimate 
functional use and activity. During the last quarter of a 
century, by an application of this principle, I have wrought 
many "miracles" (in the popular estimation), and a large 
proportion of the marvels of healing, witnessed at the pres- 
ent time, are illustrations of the principle we are discussing 
in this article. , The better way is to educate the patient into 
the application of this principle, and then he works his own 
" miracles," and in a spirit of self-reliance, becomes his own 
thaumaturgist. 

In Swedenborg's grand science of correspondence, to 
move signifies to live. (Arcana Celestia, 5G05.) Life is a 
force, and all force is a form of motion. The movements of 
the body, both voluntary and involuntary, originate in the 
soul, and are only modifications of the life of the soul. If 
your arm is lame, it is because life is retreating from it. 
Therefore follow the prescription of Jesus, "Stretch forth 
thine arm." For the motion of the limb will determine an 
influx of the Universal Life into it. For as motion is life, 
so immobility is disease and death. 

"Act, act in the living Present! 
Heart within, and God o'erhead. 

" Let us, then, be up and doing, 
With a heart for any fate ; 
Still achieving, still pursuing, 
Learn to labor and to wait." 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 115 

That state of consciousness which we denominate pain, is 
not in the material body. Its location there is an illusion 
and a false belief. Pain, like everything in nature and in 
the human body, has a mental side to it. It corresponds to 
something in the mind, which is the cause of it. If we can 
find this mental or spiritual root of it, from which it arises, 
and without which it cannot exist, and can remove it, we 
cure it. To aid us in doing this, we would observe that there 
are three classes of sensations, which include all our possible 
sensational experiences. 

In the first place is that large class of sensations which 
may with propriety be denominated indifferent sensations, 
because our mental attitude toward them is one of indiffer- 
ence. We do not care whether they go or stay. We have 
neither desire for them nor aversion toward them. They arc 
consequently neither pleasurable nor painful. For this cause 
they are out of consciousness most of the time. We become 
conscious of them only by a special act of attention to them. 
Such is the feeling of the air on the surface of the body when 
it is neither too warm nor too cold. Such also is the sensa- 
tion occasioned by the contact of our clothing with the skin. 
The larger portion of our sensations belongs to this class. 
Our mental state in relation to them is one of indifference — 
an equilibrium of desire and aversion which we call content- 
ment. 

There is another class of sensations which we denominate 
pleasurable. The pleasure may exist in a thousand different 
degrees of intensity, all depending upon our varying mental 
states in reference to them. Our mental attitude towards 
this class of sensible experiences is not one of indifference 
or neutrality, but of desire. We like them and cherish them. 
It is to be observed that the more of this desire we have, the 
more intense is the sensation of pleasure ; for the pleasure, 
when we get round to the spiritual side of it, is nothing but 



116 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

that desire ; and the pleasure cannot exist without the desire. 
As a familiar illustration of this general principle in the phil- 
osophy of human nature, we know that the more thirsty we 
are, that is, the more we desire water, the more pleasure we 
experience in drinking it. "Without the thirst in some de- 
gree, there is no pleasure in drinking the purest water on 
earth. The more hungry a man is, that is, the more intense 
his desire for food, the better his food tastes to him. "With- 
out appetite, which is only a name for desire, the richest 
viands afford no pleasure in the eating. Desire is the ground 
of all pleasurable sensations. This is the reason why the 
same thing may be pleasurable to one person, and painful 
or unpleasant to another. It is owing to the difference in 
the feelings or mental attitude of the two persons toward it. 
The one likes it ; the other dislikes it, which are only other 
names for desire and aversion. "What is pleasurable to us 
at one time may be unpleasant or painful to us at another 
time, from the law of sympathy and antipathy, or desire and 
aversion. 

There is another class of sensations, which we designate 
pain. The pain may exist in a thousand degrees of vivid- 
ness or intensity. The too great sourness of an orange or 
an apple is pain. Anything we dislike is painful to us, and 
in exact proportion to the degree in which we dislike it. Our 
mental attitude towards this class of sensations is not one of 
indifference, as in the first class, nor of desire, as in the sec- 
ond, but of aversion, and oftentimes an impatient haste to be 
rid of them. "We consider it a fixed principle, as immutable 
as any law of geometry, that the more of this aversion and 
impatience we feel, the more intense is the pain. The one is 
the exact measure of the other. The pain on the spiritual 
side of it is nothing but this feeling of aversion and impa- 
tient haste to be delivered from the sensation. If we can 
bring ourselves to feel that the pain is not an evil, but a 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 117 

good, and that all good is desirable and delightful, and re- 
move from our minds the repugnance to it, and replace it by 
a state of perfect patience and tranquil endurance, the pain 
will subside and finally cease. Swedenborg defines pain to 
be a feeling of repugnance arising from interior falses, for 
that which is repugnant to us is painful. {Apocalypse Re- 
vealed, 697.) In its spiritual essence pain is a feeling of 
repugnance, and the aversion we feel toward it arises from a 
misapprehension of its nature and use. It springs from our 
falsely viewing it as an evil, whereas it is always a good. 
The correction of this deep-seated delusion is the cure of it. 
All men love and desire what is good, and we cannot avoid 
this, for it belongs to our nature. And what we love and 
desire affords us delight, ancj never pain. If we can remove 
from our mind the aversion to what we call pain, under the 
mistaken notion that it is an evil,, the pain will go with the 
aversion out of our consciousness. There is not a law of 
nature or mind more certain in its operation than this. Pain 
is caused by our interfering with and obstructing the optim- 
ism of nature. The divine life in the world, and in the 
human body, always works in the direction of our supreme 
good. And when we can say, not as a prayer for something 
we have not, but as a state into which we have entered, 
" Thy kingdom come, and thy will be clone in earth (or in 
the material body) as it is done in heaven," our pain will 
cease. If the pain we feel, as that of a boil, is a good thing 
(and it certainly is not an evil or a disease, but an effort of 
nature towards the renewal of our life), then by viewing it 
as such, and laying aside our aversion or repugnance to it, 
and our impatience and the divergence of our will from the 
Supreme Will, it will change the nature of it, for all good is 
pleasant to us. 

In regard to any painful disease, when we perceive and 
affirm that what occasions the pain is not an evil, but a 



118 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

good, and when by the light of the supreme knowledge 
which dispels all our illusions and sensuous fallacies, we 
view it as a good, our repugnance or aversion to it ceases, 
and as that is the causal source of the pain, that also disap- 
pears from consciousness. For an effect must cease on the 
removal of its cause. The principles of this chapter will 
stand the test of experiment. I have known persons in the 
deepest agony to find immediate and permanent relief by an 
application of them. Let us remember that our real self, 
the spirit of man, is included in the Divine Being, and into 
this great habitation never tear or sorrow came. What we 
call pain is an illusion. It is a positive good, and all good is 
delightful. When we view things in the light of the supreme 
truth, or as the Divine Mind views them, and bring our will 
into line with the will that creates and governs all, our pains 
and petty sorrows fall off " like drops of rain from a lotus 
leaf." An eternal rest, a solid and enduring peace, closes 
round the soul of him who dwells in God. 

The sensual principle, says Swedenborg, is the ultimate of 
the life of man's mind, adhering and cohering to the five 
bodily senses. The principle of sense is designed to be 
entirely subservient and obedient to the intellectual principle. 
It is influenced and governed by thought and is in fact a 
mode of thought. There is a sensus communis, a common 
sense, a universal principle of sensation, in which all partic- 
ular sensation subsists. Thought directed to a part, as in 
the act of attention, causes a concentration of this principle 
to the part, and intensifies sensation, and occasions an in- 
creased consciousness of pain. To put a sensation of either 
pleasure or pain out of thought is to remove it wholly from 
consciousness. The word sense is derived from the Latin 
sensus, which is the passive participle of the verb sentio, 
which means not only to feel, but also to think. Sensation 
means that which is thought ; as idea means what is seen or 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 119 

known. Sensation is a mode of thought, and whether it be 
a pain or a pleasure depends upon how we think and feel in 
regard to it. If, as we said before, we think it an evil and 
consequently feel a repugnance toward it, the sensation will 
and must be a pain. If we think it a good, and feel no re- 
pugnance to it, then it will not be a pain. 



120 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER X. 

THE INFLUENCE OF MIND ON MIND, OR THE DOCTRINE OF 
MENTAL SPHERES, AND ITS PRACTICAL APPLICATION TO THE 
CURE OF DISEASE. 

The influence which onr minds exert over other minds 
without the use of spoken words, and independent of the 
ordinary channels of communication through the five senses, 
is a subject of great importance and constitutes the founda- 
tion of a practical system of Phrenopathy or Mental Thera- 
peutics. It has long been known, because it is a matter of 
frequent experience, that when a person in a melancholy 
frame of mind comes into a company, though he may not 
utter a word, he casts a dark shadow over the whole group. 
His influence would be felt, even though he came in unrecog- 
nized. So, on the other hand, if a person in a cheerful and 
healthful frame of mind comes into a company who are cast 
down, his unseen, but not unfelt, influence, tends to elevate 
them to a higher and better mental condition. His atmos- 
phere (or the emanation of his atma, or spirit) is beatific, 
and has the power to bless and make happy all who are 
within its range of action. This recognized feeling of sym- 
pathy of mind with mind plays a very important part both in 
the generation of diseased conditions and in their cure. 
We need to study the laws that govern its action, and then 
it can be made available in the phrenopathic method of cure. 
We are mysteriously connected with each other. Pythagoras 
is reported to have said, " that if there is one suffering soul 
in the universe, all other souls will be affected until that 
suffering soul is restored to health." This may seem an 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 121 

exaggerated statement, but there is in it a great truth. As 
is said in a fine little work on psychology recently published : 
"It is commonly known that two instruments tuned to the 
same key, and placed sufficiently near each other, are in such 
harmony that when one is struck, the corresponding key in 
the other vibrates in unison. We seem to be such instru- 
ments." {Beyond the Sunrise, p. 85.) The gift of healing 
seems to be a natural endowment. Persons possessing it 
will cure by the mental method or any other. Their spiritual 
atmosphere is charged with a sanative contagion. Their 
presence and their touch are healthful to the mind and body 
of a patient. We all know of such physicians. Their very 
presence is a medicine. The sphere of their mental life is 
more potent than their drugs. It is the action of mind 
upon mind. Says Dr. Mayo, Professor of Physiology and 
Anatomy, in King's College, London: "The mind of a 
living person in its most normal state, is always, to a certain 
extent, acting exoneurally, or beyond the limits of the 
bodily person." This is very far from being a new truth, 
but its introduction into medical science will be the dawn of 
a new day. This principle was long ago recognized and 
promulgated in the system of mental philosophy taught D3- 
Swedenborg. He says: " There goes out, yea, flows forth, 
from every man a spiritual sphere from the affections of his 
love, which sphere encompasses him, and infuses itself into 
the natural emanations from the body, so that the two spheres 
are conjoined ; that a natural sphere is continually flowing 
forth, not only from man, but also from beasts, yea, from 
trees, fruits, flowers, and also from metals, is a thing gener- 
ally known ; in like mauner, in the spiritual world ; but the 
spheres flowing forth from subjects in that world are spirit- 
ual, and those which emanate from spirits and angels are 
thoroughly spiritual, because with them there are affections 
of love, and thence interior perceptions and thoughts ; all of 



122 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

sympathy and antipathy has hence its rise, and likewise all 
conjunction and disjunction, and according thereto presence 
and absence in the spiritual world, for what is homogeneous 
and concordant causes conjunction and presence, and what 
is heterogeneous and discordant causes disjunction and ab- 
sence." (Conjugial Love, 171. Dictionary of Correspon- 
dence, under the word Sphere.) This emanative mental 
influence is as much a fact in the realm of mind as is the 
odorous exhalation of the rose, or the night-blooming cereus. 
Can it be made available in a system of mental therapeutics ? 
Few persons ever realize the potential influence of thought 
when directed towards another person, either near or far oif in 
space. On this subject we said, in a work published twenty 
years ago, which we take the liberty of reproducing here, 
"It is a fact as well established as any principle of chem- 
istry, that one mind can impress its thoughts and feelings 
upon another mind without the intervention of spoken 
words." This fact has been recently established by the 
Society for Psychical Research in England, an association 
composed of men eminent in every department of science 
and literature. In the published reports of the committee on 
Thought Transference, it has been demonstrated beyond the 
possibility of doubt, that ideas in one mind can be repro- 
duced in another mind, and oftentimes with perfect accuracy. 
If this is proved, it lays a firm scientific foundation for the 
system of mental healing. The question to be settled is 
thus clearly stated by Professor W. F. Barrett: " Is there, 
or is there not, any existing or attainable evidence that a 
vivid impression or a distinct idea in one mind can be com- 
municated to another mind without the intervening help of 
the recognized organs of sensation?" The conclusion 
arrived at after patient investigation and cautiously con- 
ducted experiments, is thus guardedly expressed by him : 
' ' I am inclined to believe that other mental phenomena — 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 123 

such, for instance, as the influence of one mind upon another 
across space without the intervention of the senses — demand 
a prior investigation. That cases of such mental action at 
a distance do really exist I, in common with others, have 
some reason to believe." To this influence of mind upon 
mind at a distance, they give the appropriate name of tele- 
pathy, a combination of two Greek words which express that 
idea. A quarter of a century ago we instituted a series of 
experiments, conducted with care, and some of them when 
the subject was removed from us several hundreds of miles. 
The conclusion at which we arrived, we stated to be, " that 
it is a law of our being, from the operation of which we 
cannot escape, that even* time we think of an absent person 
we affect him for good or evil." How careful then should 
we be to think of the absent kindly, charitably, prayerfully , 
and cheerfully. For if we arc sad and despondent, we may 
cause them to be depressed in spirit, through this telepathic 
influence ; and if our thoughts of them are expressed in the 
form of prayer, springing out of a heart overflowing with 
love and good will, through the law of unconscious sympathy, 
they may be cheered and strengthened, they know not how. 
To think of another interiorly and abstractly occasions a 
spiritual presence of that other ; distance is annihilated, and 
his living image and inner personality seem to stand before 
us, and what we say to it, we say to him. TVmen the thought 
is grounded in love and good will, it causes an interior con- 
junction of minds, a mental sympathy, a condition of rapport. 
By it we come into a living communication as real as it would 
be if we reached through the intervening space and grasped 
each other by the hand. The feelings of each are trans- 
mitted to the other. The mental state of the one who is the 
most positive will predominate and take possession of the 
other, for the stronger force will prevail over the weaker. 
In this way a morbid mental condition of a patient may be 



124 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

loosened or removed, and a healthier mental state be made 
to take its place in his consciousness. 

The nature and laws of this direct or indirect action of 
mind upon mind, and the transference of thought and ideas 
from one mind to another, is a subject of vast practical im- 
portance in its relation to the phrenopathic method of cure. 
It is the cardinal principle on which the whole system of 
mental healing is based. And it is important that we under- 
stand the laws that govern this transmission of thought and 
the conditions under which it most readily takes place. In 
the experiments of the Society for Psychical Eesearch, the 
modus operandi was essentially this. A subject was selected 
who was supposed to be more or less sensitive to thought 
impulses from other minds. He was blindfolded, in order to 
shut off from his mind the images of surrounding objects, 
and left in his normal state without inducing upon him the 
hypnotic condition. He is seated in a chair with his back 
towards the agents or operators, with pencil and paper on a 
stand by his side. A curtain may be drawn across the room 
so as to render any communication, except by thought, im- 
possible. Then the agent, or agents, as the case may be, 
draws a figure on paper or cardboard. We will take as an 
example, a triangle. We look at it with attention ; then we 
close the e}*es, and there arises in our minds a mental picture 
or image of the triangle. This is an idea. We now intently 
think of the subject, and in a minute or two he removes the 
bandage from his eyes, and with the pencil draws the figure 
on paper, copying it from the idea in his mind. Here the 
mind of the agent comes into such conjunction with that of 
the subject that the operations of the one are reproduced or 
reflected in the other. The thoughts, ideas, and even feel- 
ings of one mind arise into consciousness in another mind. 
Sometimes the agent had his hands in contact with the 
subject, but this was found not essentially to facilitate the 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 125 

tranfercnce of thought. A great variety of figures were 
drawn on paper, some of them natural objects, and some of 
them were -fantastic. They also experimented with the names 
of persons and places. And even whole sentences, such as 
" Thou shalt not kill" or " be kind to animals." These were 
reproduced correctly. In impressing a sentence like the 
above upon the mind of a sensitive, we form in the mind 
a distinct mental picture or idea of each word and each 
letter, and then the words arise in the mind of the subject in 
varying degrees of vividness. All these interesting experi- 
ments in thought transference have been collected into a 
useful little volume by Mr. William A. Ilovey, of Boston, 
entitled Mind-Beading and Beyond. But they seem, at first 
thought, to be trivial and of no value, — mere curious phe- 
nomena of mind. Their value as established facts consists 
in illustrating an important principle. Arc there not higher 
uses of that principle ? As the falling of even a pin to the 
floor illustrates and exhibits the action of the great law of 
gravitation, so these apparently trifling experiments in 
thought transference illustrate one of the most important 
principles in the world of mind, as gravitation does in the 
realm of matter. 

Thought and existence are identical. I exist because I 
think, and I think because I exist. From this established 
principle it follows that a change of thought modifies our 
existence. Ideas, which are thoughts assuming a fixed form, 
are things ; and it has been demonstrated that they are 
transmissible from one mind to another. Our ideas may 
excite like ideas in the mind of another, in a way analogous to 
that in which a sound repeats itself in an echo, or an image 
of ourself is created in a mirror. In accordance with these 
established principles, suppose we are called to a person who 
is suffering from some form of disease, which is the ultimate 
expression in the body of a wrong way of thinking. Every 



126 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

intelligent physician in his treatment, counts on the natural 
tendency of the organism towards health. It is the normal 
condition of all living beings. It is the divine idea of man, 
and the trend of everything in the woiid of mind is toward 
perfection. Suppose we form in our mind the idea that the 
patient is recovering, and that he will soon be well, and this 
becomes in us a faith, may not our idea be transferred to 
him either consciously or unconsciously, and may it not add 
a new impulse to the life forces in the direction of that 
result? In this case our idea is not a false one, for our faith 
is the belief of the truth. No good reason can be given why 
our idea may not be transferred to his mind, as well as the 
mental image of the triangle in the case mentioned above, 
and that idea may accelerate his recoverj-. Says the learned 
Professor Bush : " I know that the conceptions of my own 
mind have been reproduced in another mind without any out- 
ward signs, and I know I have not been deceived as to the 
facts averred." But why may not a physician's better way 
of thinking, and his sphere of faith and hope, be made to take 
the place of the morbid mental state of a patient ? Our mental 
states are naturally diffusive and ideas are communicable. 
An English gentleman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, 
claims to have some six hundred well authenticated cases, 
where parties separated by many miles of space, were con- 
temporaneously informed of events then taking place. {The 
New Philosophy, by Albert W. Paine, p. 65.) Such a phe- 
nomenon is not a miracle, but takes place in perfect harmony 
with the laws of mind under certain conditions. What are 
those conditions, and what are those laws ? 

In the cure of disease by the phrenopathic method, is the 
action of our mind upon the mind of the patient direct and 
immediate, or is it effected through an intermediate principle, 
in analogy with the transmission of the sensation of sound 
through the Universal iEther ? When we telegraph a friendly 



AXD MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 127 

message from Boston to London, do imponderable fluid 
shoots along the wire ; there is only the transmission of a 
force, a vibratory wave in an elastic medium which modern 
science calls the ether. • So when one mind acts upon another 
mind, and influences its thoughts and feelings, when the 
bodies which they animate may be separated by many miles 
of space, or may be in the same room, the effect is produced 
in a similar way. There is only the transmission of a men- 
tal energy, and the action and reaction of one mind or spirit 
upon another. And this takes place in an all-pervading, all- 
surrounding, and everywhere present principle a thousand 
times more subtle and vital than anything known to science. 
We may denominate it with the Hindus, the Akasa ; with the 
Rosicrucians, the astral light ; or with the Plntonists, the 
anima mundi, or world-soul; or we may adopt the name 
given to it b}' Jesus, and call it the Holy Spirit : it is essen- 
tially the same thing under various designations. A humble 
disciple of Jesus need not feel it to be presumption to ask 
and to expect the aid of that emanative divine principle of 
life and light, which is called the Holy Spirit, to aid his 
curative mental effort, and act the part of the u heavenly 
dove," to bear the quickening influence to the diseased and 
unhappy patient. It is the function of the Holy Spirit, as 
we are taught by Jesus, "to convince the world of sin (or 
of the errors of their understanding) and of righteousness 
(in the Platonic and esoteric sense of spiritual truth, or of 
truths that lie above and beyond the range of the senses) 
and of judgment to come (or to effect a separation of the 
error from the truth in our minds)." Now these are exactly 
the things to be done in curing disease by the phrenopathic 
method. " The Holy Spirit convinces the world of sin." 
says the Christ, "because they believe not in me (the per- 
sonification of spiritual truth) ; and of righteousness, be- 
cause I go unto my Father (the infinite fountain of all 



128 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

spiritual life and light) ; and of judgment, because the 
prince of this world is judged (or the dominating false 
opinions of the age in which we live, and which are a strong 
current that bear men onward to disease and death, are put 
down as a ruling power) ." (John xvi : 8-1 1 . ) And through 
Jesus and the Holy Spirit, which he sends in his name, or 
in the quality of his own life, men may come into receptive 
communication with the great currents of truth and life, 
which forever flow from God and heaven into the world of 
angels and men on the earth. 

It was found by the investigations of the Committee on 
Thought Transference, of the Society for Psychical Research, 
that " strength of will" has no particular effect, except so 
far as both subject and agent may exercise it in patient at- 
tention. What we need is to be able to form in our own 
minds a clear and distinct conception of the words or ideas 
which we desire to impress upon the mind of the subject. 
So in the cure of disease by this method, one would quite 
naturally suppose that an intense mental effort, or what is 
usually called will, would be necessary to any favorable re- 
sult. But this is a mistake, as has been proven by the 
experiences of many years. It is our business only to tliinlc 
the truth (and under the proper conditions to affirm it ver- 
bally) , and then to leave the truth to have everything its own 
way. An effort of will adds nothing to its force. The more 
we lose sight of self, in our curative effort, and the more we 
trust in God, in the Christ, and in the Holy Spirit, the better 
it will be for us and for the patient. When a person is in. a 
state of passivity or mental inertia, his mind is a carte 
blanche, or white paper, ready to be inscribed with the truth. 
If a patient is actuated by a sincere desire of recovery, and 
is predisposed to believe you, and trusts in you, and has no 
repugnance or antipathy to you, it constitutes an affinitive 
attraction for your higher thoughts and feelings. His mind 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 129 

is open to the impact of your mental influence. Your 
thoughts of truth, your feelings of faith and hope, leave their 
impress upon the tablet of his mental being for all time to 
come, like the tracks of the gigantic birds of a former geo- 
logical age upon the then soft and yielding sandstone rocks 
of the Connecticut River valley. Mental impressions will 
endure when inscriptions ou marble or granite rock have 
worn away and become illegible. It should be our aim and 
wish, not merely to impress our thoughts upon a patient's 
mind, but to lift him from a lower to a higher plane of 
thought. There are two worlds or ranges of existence, — 
the spiritual world and the natural or psychical world. Both 
these worlds are included in the mind of man. The natural 
world, being the lower region of the mind, is the seat of dis- 
ease ; the spiritual world, being the uppermost region of the 
mind, is the region of health and true blessedness. To ele- 
vate a patient from the plane of sense, " the horrible pit and 
miry clay," into the spiritual realm of his being, is to place 
him beyond the reach of all possible maladies. The natural 
world, including the human body, is not the real world. It 
is in itself vanity, or emptiness. It is maia, or illusion. 
Matter, as a deceptive appearance, is the prison of the im- 
mortal spirit, the real man and son of God. To terminate 
this unnatural bondage, and convince the patient of the un- 
reality of the body and its diseases, is to cure him. If we 
can do no more, we can think this eternal truth for him, and 
the sphere of our minds ma} T influence him. We may pass 
into the spiritual realm of thought ourselves, and then, as 
Jesus does, beiug lifted up, we draw men unto us. As the 
poet Wordsworth expresses it : — 

" We are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul ; 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." 



130 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

The Committee on Thought Transference come to the con- 
clusion, as they state in their report, that the "psychical 
telergy," or the " telepathic impact," or, to translate it into 
ordinary language, the influence of our ideas and mental 
suggestions, falls upon the sub-conscious region of the mind 
of the subject, and then emerges into consciousness by what- 
ever channel happens in each case to be the easiest. {Re- 
port for July, 1884, p. 121.) In giving the mental treatment 
for disease, the patient at the time may not be conscious of 
any effect produced, and yet in time, perhaps the next day, 
he becomes sensible of improvement. Because a person 
feels no influence, like that of electricity, is no proof that he 
is not benefited by the treatment. Mental and spiritual 
impressions made on the unconscious or preconscious region 
of the mind, or on the substance of the mind, may be like 
the picture on the negative plate of the photographic artist, 
invisible at first, but nevertheless really there, and which by 
the action of certain chemical agents is made to appear for 
all time to come. In the transference of ideas from our 
mind to that of another, the picture is imperceptible at first, 
but gradually emerges into consciousness. There are some 
persons who are extremely sensitive to the action of other 
minds, but they are not always more readily cured by the 
phrenopathic method than others who are less impressible. 
The case of a young female, by the name of Euphrosine is 
mentioned by M. Barrier, a physician of Privas, in a com- 
munication to Dr. Foissac, published forty years ago, who 
possessed so perfectly the gift of divining the thoughts of 
the person with whom she happened to be, that she readily 
kept up a veiy well-connected conversation, in which one of 
the interlocutors spoke only mentally. {Mesmer and Siceden- 
borg, by Professor George Bush, p. 43.) Many cases of this 
kind have existed and been recorded. But such extreme 
sensitiveness is veiT far from being necessary in patients 
who subject themselves to the phrenopathic method of cure. 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 131 

111 the experiments of the Society for Psychical Research, 
the subjects were in their perfectly normal condition. But 
they state that they have a large amount of evidence which 
conclusively shows that transference of thought (and even 
sensation and feeling) occurs far more readily when the per- 
cipient is under the magnetic influence, or is in the hypnotic 
state. (Report for July, 1883, p. 173.) This is what has 
been known for many years. The magnetic sleep is not 
necessary or even desirable, but only enough of the magnetic 
influence, to render the patient impressible to your thought- 
impulses, to induce upon him a state of passivity and rap- 
port, and to incline him to accept and believe the truth you 
affirm and suggest, either verbally or mentally. Magnetism 
is only the influence of one mind on another mind, and 
through the mind on the body. Says the learned Professor 
Bush: "The main phenomena of magnetism are mental. 
They involve the laws of mental communication between one 
spirit and another." Again he says : "The transfer of 
thought may perhaps be regarded as the cardinal fact of the 
magnetic developments. In the whole category of its mar- 
vels there is nothing more wonderful — nothing more difficult 
to believe, yet nothing more easy to prove." (Megmer and 
Sicedenborg (1847), pp. 15, 53.) In this higher and true 
meaning of the word magnetism, there can be no reasonable 
objection to applying it to the mental-cure system. It is 
only magnetism in its higher spiritual applications and uses. 
But there is no occasion for controversy about names. A 
rose would smell as sweet under any other name, yet the old 
name is like an old and tried friend with whom we do not 
like to part. In the mental system of cure, as in the phe- 
nomena of magnetism, ideas and saving truths are trans- 
ferred from one mind to another, and what is subjective in 
our mind becomes an objective reality to the patient, for 
ideas are causes. In a review of the Primitive Jlind- 



132 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

Cure, the literary editor of the New York Tribune very 
truly remarks : " It is a part of the mysterious processes of 
mind, that subjective ideas may become as real, nay, even 
more real, than objective phenomena ; and this is one of the 
clews to Mind-Cure." This is all that we claim for the sys- 
tem. Our higher and better idea of man and of the patient, 
when transferred to his unconscious mind, may be developed 
into consciousness and actuality as a vital impulse in the 
direction of its full realization in the physical organism. It 
may stimulate and accelerate the natural reaction of the vital 
powers against disease, and increase the tendency to health 
and happiness. In sickness the sphere of a sympathetic 
friend is the best of all medicines for the soul or the body. 
As a messenger sent from God, he comes to the help of the 
Lord (one of the designations of the universal saving and 
healing principle), against the mighty. The system of drug 
medication has had, and still has, its uses. But is there not 
a hio-her and more efficient method of cure? Does drus; 
medication belong to Christianity ? Did Jesus and the apos- 
tles deal in pills and potions? And did they not cure even 
organic diseases? While not discarding a true medical 
science, may we not learn more at the feet of Jesus? La} T - 
ing aside, forever, the diabolical cruelties of vivisection, 
which ought to make a savage hide his face for shame, let 
us stucty the inner nature of man, and the undeveloped 
powers and potentialities of mind. Happily for the world, 
advanced minds in the medical profession are beginning to 
feel that man is something more than his anatomical struc- 
ture, and that there are other and better remedies than pois- 
onous drugs. And this feeble light of the dawn, which is 
hardly distinguishable from the darkness, will grow into a 
new day. 

The sj^stem of mental healing, which is exciting so much 
interest in every part of the country, is no new thing in the 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 133 

world either in its philosophy or practice. It is only the 
reappearance under the mask of another name of one of 
the fundamental principles of Christianity, the doctrine of 
salvation by faith, using the word faith in its primitive 
Christian and Platonic sense of a higher form of knowledge. 
It is the cognition of spiritual realities and verities which 
are beyond the ken of the psychical mind of man. The 
cure of disease by this modern phrenopathic method is 
only the old primitive doctrine of conversion, by which is 
signified a complete inversion of a person's way of think- 
ing, the turning about of the subject of it from the life of 
sense to the dominion of the spirit. If it is not this, it is 
of no great value. The term conversion seems to have been 
used by Jesus to designate the mental side of the change 
which took place in healing the diseased. He says of the 
sensuous Jews of his day: "This people's heart is waxed 
gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they 
have closed ; lest kaph* they should perceive with their eyes, 
and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, 
and be converted (or turn about), and I should heal them." 
(Matt, xiii: 15. Mark iv : 12.) The cures effected by Jesus 
were a radical change in the mental status of the patient, 
and no half-way affairs. The body was saved from disease 
by redeeming the soul from the dominion of sin, or the 
illusion of the senses, and the life of iniquity to which it 
led. This was the system of spiritual cure eighteen cen- 
turies ago, and it is returning to the world to-day. But the 
Christ, as the personification of the principle of spiritual 
enlightenment, has so long been absent from the various 
warring systems called Christianity, through the prevalence 
of materialism, or what Hegel forcibly denominates the 
"dirt philosophy," that when he comes again to his old 
home in the church and the world, it has seemed proper to 
introduce him to the modern members of the ecclesiastical 



134 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITV 

family under another name, as the old names had become 
empt\- of meaning. But as Christianity comes to have a 
deeper meaning in the minds of men, the old names, as the 
appropriate vessels for the containing and expressing the 
truths of the kingdom of God, will come back into use, and 
the ancient wine of spiritual truth will again fill out the old 
empty bottles. And the new patch that is now being put 
into the old threadbare Christian garment, will grow into a 
complete and connected whole ; the robe without a seam 
which Jesus wore, and which in the science of correspond- 
ence signifies a harmonious and perfect system of spiritual 
doctrine. As it was in the clays of yore so will it be again, 
that he who touches but the hem or fringe of it will be made 
whole. In the present mental cure system, I know of no 
principle which is true that is not found in the New Tes- 
tament and in the true spiritual philosophy of all ages and 
nations. He who carefully studies that development of 
Christianity which we have in the writings of Swedenborg 
will find all the truth there is in the various schools of 
mental cure. And his spiritual philosophy is nothing but a 
reproduction and amplification of the ancient Hermetic and 
Kabalistic science. It would be a very difficult, and even 
impossible, achievement to produce an absolutely new truth 
in philosophy or religion. The mental history of the race 
repeats itself in regularly recurring cycles. In the revolving 
wheel of life the early Christian method of cure by faith, 
and which through the prevalence of materialism and sen- 
sualism had descended to the bottom of the circle, is now 
coming uppermost again under the name of phrenopathy or 
mind-cure. But names are arbitrary and changeable, while 
principles are immutable. A skillful botanist would recog- 
nize the pink, the Diantlius or flower of God, even though 
the people where it grew should call it a lily. So in the 
modern system of mental healing we recognize the operation 



AXD MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 135 

of that principle in the Hebrew theosophy which was called 
Raphael, the divine physician, onlv the redeeming angel 
comes to us in a modern dress and in the imperfect disguise 
of another name. - 



136 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER XI. 

PHRENOPATHY, OR MENTAL CURE, AS A PRACTICAL SYSTEM. 

In the present chapter it is our purpose to give in a con- 
densed form all that is necessary for one to know in order to 
the practice of the phrenopathic method of cure in his family 
and among his friends. The practical application of the 
philosophical principles, which have been discussed in the 
preceding pages, to the cure of ourselves and others is ex- 
tremely simple, and can be learned by any person of ordinary 
intelligence, in a brief time. We have given in the series of 
works which we have published during the last twenty years 
on the subject of Mental Therapeutics, especially in the two 
volumes which immediately precede this, the fundamental 
principles in the practice of the system of mental healing. 
Little more need be said, and in the present state of knowl- 
edge on the subject but little more can be said. There is a 
great deal of babble about things that have no practical value, 
and have no more relation to an established system of phren- 
opathy than they have to astronomy or geology. The fol- 
lowing principles have been used by the author for nearly a 
quarter of a centuiy, and may be viewed as established rules 
in the phrenopathic method of cure. 

In accordance with the principles unfolded in the preceding 
chapter relating to the influence of mind on mind and the 
doctrine of the silent influence of our mental sphere upon 
others, it would seem to be a matter of the first importance 
that we should be ourselves well and happy, for the universal 
life-giving principle flowing through us will partake of the 
quality of the medium through which it flows, just as the light 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 137 

of heaven passing through colored glass emerges from it with 
the particular color of the substance through which it is trans- 
mitted. When we are in a sound mental, and consequently 
physical, condition, a saving influence may be communicated 
to others through us. When a person has passed out of 
death into life, he naturally desires to be the means of helping- 
others. (1 John iii : 14.) The words of Jesus to Peter have 
a special application to all such, '• I have prayed for you that 
your faith fail not : and when thou art converted (or turned 
from the life of sense to the life of the spirit), strengthen (or 
establish) thy brethren." (Luke xxii : 32.) 

Every perfectly healthy person is a contribution to the 
general well-being of the collective humanity. The sphere 
of his life is a valuable acquisition to the race in its organic 
unity. Every sick, sinful, unhappy, and complaining invalid 
is. so far as his influence goes, a public calamity, a diseased 
and sore spot in the body of the universal man. He roils the 
current of the world's life, and a great many of them make 
the water of life very muddy. 

The phrenopathic and Christian method of cure is essen- 
tially a system of instruction. The doctor is the teacher, as 
the word itself implies. He aims to bring the patient into 
his own mode of thought and feeling. We can teach by 
verbal instruction or by the silent sphere of our life. But we 
cannot impart by any method what we do not possess. What 
we have not and are not we cannot give. On this subject 
Emerson has well said : ' ; If a man can communicate himself, 
he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and 
he learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil 
is brought into the same state or principle in which you are ; 
a transfusion takes place : he is you. and you are he ; then is 
a teaching : and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can 
he ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out 
of one ear as thev ran into the other." Again, on the sub- 



138 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

ject of the communication of thought by our silent mental 
sphere, he says: "That which we are we shall teach, not 
voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our 
minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go 
out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily 
opened.*' (Essays, First Series, pp. 122, 127.) 

When a person is himself in a cheerful and normal state of 
mind, and consequently in a healthy condition physically, and 
sitting or standing near an invalid who has no feeling of 
antipatlry to him, the emanative sphere of his life is always 
salutary. He surrounds the patient with his own healthier 
atmosphere, and envelops and pervades his gloom and despair 
with his life of faith and hope. As to the distance from which 
we sit or stand in order that this transfusion of thought and 
feeling may take place most readily, it is said in the report of 
the Society for Psychical Research, that a distance of three 
or four feet is best. But that is a matter of little moment. 
If the mental rapport is established, which is the most im- 
portant thing, it may be three feet or three hundred miles. 
Nearness and distance in the realm of spirit are not estimated 
in feet, in miles and leagues, but are states of the interiors. 
We may have a feeling of great nearness and a consciousness 
of presence of an absent friend, and of utter remoteness 
from a stranger at our side. In this experience the soul of 
man begins to assert its freedom from the limitations of 
space, and gets a fore-gleam of the life eternal. 

That manifestation (or emanation) of God which is called 
Yava (and rendered in our common version of the Scriptures, 
Jehovah) is the supreme saving and healing principle and 
power, and is represented by the name of Jesus. As a mani- 
festation of God he is everywhere present, not because he 
is infinitely extended in space, but because he is wholly free 
from the finite limitations of both time and space. This prin- 
ciple viewed as a person is signified by the Lord, when that 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 139 

word occurs in small capitals in our common version. It is 
he who forgiveth all our iniquities (or removes from us all 
the errors of our understanding), aud thus healeth all our 
diseases, and redeemeth our life from destruction. (Ps. 
ciii:l-5.) There is no more efficient method of healing 
ourselves or others than to assume towards this saving power 
an attitude of peaceful trust, and let him save us. They who 
thus wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength, or 
recover back their former vigor of mind and bod}'. (Tsa. 
xl:31.) Again, it is said by the poet king of Israel, 
"Blessed (or happy, and consequently healthy) is the man 
who trusteth in thee." for this angel or emanative principle 
and messenger of the Lord encampeth round about them that 
fear him and delivereth them. (Ps. xxxiv : 7, 8.) In our 
efforts to cure others we can do nothing better than to employ 
the method of silent trust described in a former chapter. 
We come into a state of unity with that in which we trust, 
and likeness to it, and this by a profound law of our being. 
In the case of idols that are the objects of religious adoration 
it is said, " They that make them are like unto them, so is 
every one who trusteth in them." (Ps. cxv : 8, 9.) In the 
employment of the method of trust, and a silent aspiration 
of the soul to the Highest and the Best, the mental system 
of healing and the cure of disease by prayer and faith become 
one. The cure of mental and physical disease by prayer is 
based on the recognition of a truth (with often only an 
obscure and dreamy perception of it) . which is expressed by 
Swedenborg. "that man is so made that he can apply to 
himself life from the Lord." (Arcana Celestia, 4525.) 
There is a divinely vital and life-giving principle and saving 
energy, universally diffused, and consequently ever accessible 
and always available, which is in a perpetual effort to heal us 
of all our maladies of soul and body. Its existence and 
ceaseless operation lies beyond the apprehension of sense. 



140 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

and must consequently be perceived and appropriated by 
faith, and grasped by the mind and taken up into our indi- 
vidual being and consciousness by real prayer, which is not 
the repetition of a form of words, but a certain receptive state 
and attitude of the mind and heart of man. This universal 
saving energy has the quality and attribute of the Divine 
Love, that it seeks to impart itself and its immortal blessed- 
ness to everything ; and the condition of receiving it is to be 
willing to receive it, to desire it, to hold the soul passively 
open and upward toward it, and to believe and trust that it 
is saviug us. Fichte has truly said, " that we must already 
be in a certain sense that which we would become in order to 
become so." {Destination of Man, p. 22.) Desire of more 
and better life is the commencement of it. Hence Jesus 
affirms, "Ask, and ye shall receive ; seek, and ye shall find ; 
knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that 
asketh, receiveth." (Matt, vii : 7.) This is absolutely true. 
The reason, the cause, the hidden spring of our asking for 
more life, or for any spiritual good, is because we have it in 
a degree already. We must recognize the truth and reality 
of this. And since belief or faith (which are the same word 
in the original language of the New Testament) is the ground 
of all reality, as everything is real to us in the same propor- 
tion as we believe it, we come into actual possession and a 
mental appropriation of it by faith only. God can give us 
nothing except through faith. Hence Jesus says : "What 
things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive, 
and ye shall have.'" (Mark xi : 24.) The faith is the reality 
of the thing itself, for faith is the substance of things hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen. (Heb. xi : 1.) Hence 
it is not only philosophically reasonable, but absolutely cer- 
tain from one of the deepest laws of our being that the 
prayer of faith will save the sick. And this is no departure 
from the laws of our nature ; in other words, no miracle, but 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 141 

only the operation of a higher law, for in the realm of spirit, 
what is viewed as supernatural by the psychical mind or man, 
becomes there the perfectly natural. But in the spiritual 
state of man prayer lays aside the noisy volubility of the 
Pharisees, aud resolves itself into a tranquil and silent life of 
trust. It is like the child deeply conscious of his need, who 
approaches you in silence, casts upon you an imploring look, 
and holds out his hand to receive what your wisdom and 
goodness are disposed to give. Neither the ear or hand of 
God is ever closed against such an appeal. 

The attitude of tranquil and silent trust in the Christ, 
as he who can save to the uttermost, has all the influence 
attributed b} T physiologists to "expectant attention," about 
which they speak. The idea of the state to be induced and 
the change to be effected, is formed in the mind, and in the 
silence of passive trust we wait its full realization in us. 
The lesson taught in the passage, of the ancient wisdom, 
" Be still, and know that I am God," is one of the hardest a 
nervous invalid has to learn. Silence is the thing to which 
he is least inclined. But he must be instructed not to speak 
of his troubles ; for every time he gives an ultimate expres- 
sion to them in words, they grow larger in his imagination, 
and take deeper root. What we most need is rest to our 
souls, and this we can never have until we cease from our 
own works. (Heb. iv : 10.) We must lay aside the toiling 
oar, and float in the current of the infinite Life. As an 
infant, tired out and exhausted by its fruitless cries, sinks to 
rest in the maternal arms, so we must cease from our 
struggles, and sink to rest in the bosom of the manifested 
God. 

" Wisdom ripens into silence as she grows more truly wise, 
And she wears a mellow sadness in her heart and in her eyes : 
Wisdom ripens into silence, and the lesson she doth teach 
Is that life is more than language, and that thought is more than 
speech." 



142 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY. 

In treating a patient by the method of simple trust, we 
should wait in the silence that lies at the heart of things for 
the ' ' soundless word " that shall arise out of the eternal 
Life. In the stillness of our own soul and will, we are to 
let it speak in us, and through us, to the soul of the patient. 
There is a divine saving power in it. It is that inward voice 
referred to by the centurion when he said to Jesus, " Speak 
the word only, and my servant (or child) shall be healed." 
An eloquent silence is more effectual than the noisy babble 
of superficial minds, especially if it is the speaking silence of 
tranquil trust. Such an unshaken trust is like an immovable 
rock beaten by a thousand waves of the sea, and turns them 
all back into the abyss. " Trust ye in the Lord forever : for 
in the Lord Jehovah (Jah, Java) is everlasting strength," 
or, literally rendered, a rock of ages. (Isa. xxvi : 4.) 

While we are to educate a patient to maintain an obstinate 
silence in regard to his disease and its symptoms, we are to 
draw out from him a verbal acknowledgment of his cure, or 
of any improvement in his condition. He is to avoid any- 
thing that might seem a presumptuous boasting, for that 
often indicates an approaching relapse, but make a humble 
confession. This confirms and ultimates the belief or faith 
of a cure, " Because if thou shalt confess the word with thy 
mouth that Jesus (who represents and personifies the supreme 
saving principle) is Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that 
God hath raised him from the dead (in thee), thou shalt be 
saved (or healed) ; for with the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness (in the Kabalistic and Platonic sense), and 
with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." (Rom. 
x:9, 10.) To give expression to our feelings in words 
intensifies them and makes them permanent. 

We are to educate a patient to look upon what he calls his 
disease, not as an evil, not as a disease, but an effort of the 
divine life of nature to rid us of the real malady, which is 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. . 143 

mental, and lies back of all the symptoms. He is not 
to judge of his so-called malady from the deceptive 
appearances of the senses, but to look at it from a higher 
range of the intellect. This may seem a difficult lesson to 
learn, but it is by no means an impossible one. As is well 
said by Dr. Jennings, u Accustom yourself to all your little 
pains and aches, and also in j^our grave and more distressing 
affections, to regard the movement concerned in them in a 
friendly aspect, designed for and tending to the removal of 
a difficulty of whose existence you were before unaware, and 
which, if suffered to remain and accumulate, might prove the 
destruction of the house you live in ; and that instead of 
needing to be cured, it is itself a curative operation, and that 
which should be called a disease lies back of the symptoms, 
which, in fact, are made for the express purpose of removing 
the real disorder or difficulty." These are words of wisdom. 
By viewing what we call disease in this aspect, and layiug 
aside our feeling of repugnance to it as an evil, we essentially 
change the nature of it, and remove all obstruction to the 
divine curative process. 

The sentiment of fear, in its Protean forms, plays a most 
important part in the inception and progress of diseased 
conditions. It is a fountain that sends forth nothing but 
bitter waters. Hence it would seem to be the first business 
of a phrenopathic physician to allay the fears of a patient, 
which is often equivalent to a cure. Fear is often the 
keystone of the arch, on the removal of which the morbid 
structure which the imagination has reared falls to the 
ground. In many cases an abnormal fearfulness is the 
mental and real malady. By the law of thought-transference, 
write upon the unconscious region of the mind of the patient 
the prescription of Jesus, Cw Be not afraid; only believe, " 
and, "Peace, be still." Let the calm, tranquil sphere of 
your own mind be like oil on the troubled waves, and, as in 



144 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

the storm on the lake of Galilee, " the giant waves will sink 
like sobbing infants to their rest." Before we can work 
such transformations in the mental condition of a patient, we 
must be free from fear ourselves^ for there is no mental state 
which is more contagious. "There is no fear in love, but 
perfect love casteth out fear. He who feareth is not made 
perfect in love." (1 John iv:18.) It was the sublime 
calmness and self-possession of Jesus the Christ which gave 
him such power over the troubled minds of men. 
"Majestic sweetness sat enthroned 
Upon the Savior s brow." 

On the influence of fear in causing disease, and consequently 
upon the importance of removing it, an intelligent physician 
of Davenport, Iowa, writes to Mind in Nature, published in 
Chicago, "that in 1832, before the cholera had made its 
appearance in the United States, his brother was living in 
Oxford, Ohio, and when he heard the first news of its 
probably reaching this country, he became greatly excited. 
He was sure he would fall a victim to the disease, he said. 
His fear increased as further reports came, and before the 
malady reached New York, he was taken sick with Asiatic 
cholera, attended with all the concomitant symptoms, and 
died within twenty-four hours after being attacked." — Mind 
in Nature, May, 1885. It might be proper to ask, Was it 
really cholera that caused his death? Was it not fear of 
which he died? The cholera was not the primary, but a 
secondary disease. The cholera was only a symptom of the 
real malady. 

We have seen in the preceding chapter that the cure of 
disease by the phrenopathic method is, or should be, the 
same as that change of mental status which in the New 
Testament is called conversion. The Greek term l-n-io-Tpo^q 
signifies a full and complete turning, as the preposition in 
the compound word gives intensity of meaning to it. It is a 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 145 

turning, not of the body, but of the mind, from the life of 
sense to a spiritual mode of thought and feeliug. When the 
psychical or natural man becomes the spiritual man, which 
transition from the lower to the higher degree of our being is 
called conversion, the chauge is described by Jesus as a 
passing from death unto life. "Verily, verily" (which in the 
original is amen, from the Hebrew amuna, truth), "I say 
unto you, he that heareth my words, aud believeth him that 
sent me, hath eternal life (as a present attainment) and shall 
not come into condemnation, but hath passed out of death 
into life." (John v : 24.) So great a chauge as this ought 
surely to be nothing less than a transition from disease into 
health, both of mind and body. It is, in the New Testament 
sense of the word, a resurrection, for the anastasis of which 
Jesus speaks is not the resuscitation of a dead body in a 
graveyard, but an ascent in the scale of life from the psychi- 
cal to the spiritual degree of existence. 

In the primitive Christian system, sin and disease are 
the same. Sin is the mental, and disease the physical, side 
of the same thing. To cure disease and forgive sin, in the 
fulness of meaning given to that expression by Jesus, are 
identical. We do not of course use the terms forgiveness 
of sin in the superficial sense given to them in the popular 
theology, the mere saving of the guilty from deserved pun- 
ishment, but in the signification of the original words. The 
term employed to express the idea of forgiveness (dc^/xi) 
means to put away or remove a thing. This is in fact the 
radical meaning of the English word forgive. The first 
syllable, for, is the same as the Saxon far, and to forgive 
sins is to put them far away, and you cannot place a thing 
further away from another than to remove it from thought 
and from belief. The Latin-English word remit has the same 
meaning, and also the French pardonnei\ where the sylla- 
ble par is the equivalent of the Saxon far, and the meaning 



146 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

is to put a thing far away, as, for instance, an error, a sin. 
This is the forgiveness or pardon of sin that has some saving 
or healing value in it to the sinner. It is not putting a veil 
over the sin, but a taking it out- of the man's life. The 
Buddhist doctrine of Karma .admits of no escape from the 
results of wrong doing. What a man sows he must of neces- 
sity reap. This is in a certain sense true. But a man ma} T 
stop sowing error and evil, and then he has no more reaping 
to do of that kind of crop, and both the seed and the har- 
vest ma}' be destroyed. Christianity has revealed to the 
world the doctrine of the remission of sin. Sin may be put 
away. Our transgressions may be blotted out, that is, ex- 
punged from the record of the universal life-principle. It is 
said of Jehovah, who is represented in the Gospels by Jesus, 
the supreme saving principle, that he will turn again and 
have compassion upon us, and subdue our iniquities, and 
cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah vii : 19.) 
That means that they shall be covered from sight, and obliter- 
ated from the book of remembrance, which is the universal 
life. The ocean is very deep, and a thing on the bottom of 
it is for us practically out of existence. Captain James Ross 
in the region west of St. Helena sounded to the depth of 
more than five miles and a quarter, and found no bottom. 
Our sin (or error) which has led to disease may be put away 
from us, and covered in the depths of the sea, where it can 
never be the seed of a future harvest, and we may be placed 
back on the same footing that we should be if we had never 
sinned (or erred). This is at least the teaching of Jesus 
and Christianity. He who practises the phrenopathic method 
of cure will have occasion to say in the language of the 
Apostles, " Repent ye therefore, and turn about, that your 
sins may be blotted out, that so there may come seasons of 
refreshing from the presence of the Lord, and that he may 
send the Christ who hath been appointed for you, even 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 147 

Jesus" (the saving, healing principle and power). (Acts 
iii:19, 20.) 

In treating a patient by the mental method, it is incum- 
bent on us to ascertain what the underlying sin (or error, 
false belief) is, and aim to correct it and put it away from 
him, for it sustains a causal relation to his malad}-. It will 
always be found to be some illusion of the sensuous mind. 
We can learn what it is from the statement of the case by 
the patient, who is generally only too willing to give it. On 
the development of the intuition in us, we can detect the 
mental side of a given disease at once, and with well-nigh 
unerring certainty. And we are to treat that, and not the 
physical effect. The great mass of mankind are under the 
powerful dominion of phantasy. An illusive conception may 
lead, and usually does lead, to an error in the life. Any 
transgression of the laws of life, any deviation from the 
divine order of our earthly existence, grieves the Holy Spirit 
(to use a New Testament expression) , which is the divine 
life-principle, and is that whereby we are sealed unto the 
day of redemption, or the deliverance from the dominion of 
the body, and the unnatural lordship of the senses. All 
such errors of belief, and consequent evils in practice, must 
be repented of, using the term in a philosophic sense. That 
state of the mind which is denominated repentance prepares 
the way for the exercise of faith, or that higher form of 
thought and knowledge by which we are made whole. The 
original word for repentance (/zeravoia) signifies a change of 
mind or thought, a change of will or purpose, and is so de- 
fined in the standard lexicons. It is not merely sorrow for 
sin, for a godly sorrow worketh repentance. (2 Cor. vii : 10.) 
It is not a reformation of the life, for that is the fruit or 
effect of it, and not the thing itself. When a man. is con- 
vinced of his error, and rejects it as an evil which is contrary 
to the divine Will, which is the same as the Infinite Good- 



148 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

ness, and thus changes his mind or way of thinking in regard 
to it, and purposes to think and live differently, he has re- 
pented and come into an attitude of mind toward the hurtful 
error and evil that renders the remission, or putting away, of 
the sin from him possible. It was a tenet of the Platonic 
philosophy, that no one ever desires or chooses evil as evil, 
but only under the mistaken conception of it as a good. 
According to the laws of the mind, evil viewed as such can- 
not be an object of desire. All deviation from right liv- 
ing is the result of an error of the understanding, — a sin, 
— and this must be corrected. It is to be also remarked, 
that to correct an error in ourselves is to come into the oppo- 
site truth. If it be an error, an illusion, that I, the immor- 
tal Ego and real self, am sick, if the error be removed, I 
must believe the opposite, that I am well. If my malady i3 
not in my real self, it must be an unreal thing, a delusive 
appearance. To put away an evil is from a necessary and 
immutable law to come into the opposite good. If a man 
ceases to be idle, he must be industrious ; if he ceases to be 
intemperate, he comes into the virtue of temperance. The 
end of the night is the beginning of the morning. It is our 
business to correct the error and the evil in a patient ; the 
opposite good and truth will take care of themselves. Here 
we have a practical application of the highest law of thought, 
the law of contradictions. Says Sir William Hamilton : 
_ "The highest of all logical laws, in other words, the supreme 
law of thought, is what is called the principle of contradic- 
tion. It is this : a thing cannot be and not be at the same 
time. Alpha est, Alpha non est (Alpha is, Alpha is not) 
are propositions which cannot both be true at once. There 
is no middle ground that is tenable, and on the principle of 
excluded middle between two contradictories, while both 
cannot be true, one must be true." {Lectures on Metaphys- 
ics, p. 526.) 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 149 

As sickness and health are opposite and contradictory 
states, and cannot both be predicated of a man at the same 
time, if we can cause him to perceive and feel that he is not 
sick, he must feel that he is well, for one must be true. We 
have all read many times the story of certain medical stu- 
dents making a man in health sick bv causing him to think 
and believe that he was sick. In the phrenopathic method of 
cure we simply reverse this process, and make the man well 
by inducing him to think himself well ; not that we would 
deny the fact of the disease, as a state of his consciousness, 
but simply that the immortal Ego, the spiritual entity and 
real man, is neither diseased nor unhappy. The disease is 
in a region of our existence that is below or, what means the 
same, is external to the man, the essentially human nature 
and principle. How we may best effect this radical change 
in an invalid's way of thinking of himself is a question of 
supreme moment, and one which we are called upon to 
answer. 

It is to be done by the simple power of thought, uttered 
in appropriate words, or symbolic signs, or unexpressed. 
There is a living force and saving energy in thought. It is 
thought which shapes and governs the worlds, and it is our 
thoughts which mould our fate, for thought and existence 
are one. 

" I hold it true that thoughts are things 

Endowed with being, breath, and wings : 

And that w r e send them forth to fill 

The world with good results, or ill." 

In treating a patient by the mental method, with a kindly 
positive and affirmative attitude of mind, we are steadfastly 
to think the truth in regard to his inner self, and maintain in 
our minds the correct idea of ourselves and of him ; and the 
silent sphere of our minds, according to the law of thought- 
transference, will influence him in a degree proportioned 
to his susceptibility. 



150 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

The reader would do well to review the subject of the na- 
ture and influence of ideas, as given in the first, the eighth, 
and fifteenth chapters of the preceding volume of the author. 
The types, patterns, and formative causes of things are 
called ideas. Ideas have been defined by Hermes Trismegis- 
tus as " the forms of the Invisible." God's ideas of things 
are the causes of the existence of all the objects of nature. 
Our perfect ideal of the patient transferred to the sub-con- 
scious region of his mind will operate as a cause. After we 
have thoroughly mastered the doctrine of the triune nature 
of man, and have learned that the spirit is a personal limita- 
tion of the Supreme Spirit, it ought not to be a difficult thing 
to form the true idea of a patient. Our real life lies deeper 
than the ken of the psychical man can penetrate ; it is more 
divine than it ever appears to sense. It is hid with Christ 
in God. Disease and every form of evil are but the drift- 
wood on the surface of the current ; deeper down towards 
the divine centre of all things, our personality, without ever 
being lost, is forever allied to the infinitude of God. We 
look away from the surface of a patient's being, become 
blind to the disease which has its seat only there, and recog- 
nize his unchanging, undying, spiritual self alone, which is 
included in the Christ and is one with the manifested God. 
We look beyond the appearance of life, to its divine reality ; 
for, as Henry James has said, " God is the all of man's life ; 
the power of man is at the bottom the power of God." 
Hence man — that is, the essentially human principle — is 
never sick or infirm. There is a saving power in this eternal 
truth. In disease it is the horn of the altar before which we 
have taken refuge, and to which we cling with a tenacity of 
faith whose grasp no earthly power can unloose. We hold 
to it in spite of the senses and even reason. 

Without puzzling ourselves or the patient with specula- 
tions as to the origin of evil, we are to recognize the immut- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 151 

able and necessary truth, that God wills to have all men to 
be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 
(1 Tim. ii:4.) And if we ask anything according to his 
will, we know that he hears us. (1 John v: 14.) The will 
of God is the Eternal Goodness, and what God wills, is. It 
is said, in a very ancient work of Hermes Trismegistus on 
Initiations, "that the will of God is absolute accomplish- 
ment ; to will and to do are for him the work of the selfsame 
instant." Again : " He who is the fulness of all things, and 
who possesses all that he wills, wills nothing by caprice. 
But everything he wills is good, and he has all that he wills. 
Such is God, and the world is the image of his righteous- 
ness." "With the manifested God, who is the Christ, the will 
and the existence of the thing willed are an inseparable unity. 
Hence, in the Christ, and in the Christ region of cur own 
being, every man is already saved. By faith we view our- 
selves (and others) as having a salvation in him. "We are 
complete in him who is the head of all principality and 
power. (Col. ii : 10.) By maintaining this idea of ourselves 
and the patient, with an obstinacy that is the result of an 
inward conviction, this subjective salvation which we have 
in the Christ becomes objective. The ideal, which is the 
inmost real, will beeome the actual. As certainly as a seed 
with its living germ has in it a conatus or tendency to unfold 
into the perfected plant, so surely does an idea in the mind 
tend to translate itself into a bodily expression. 

If it be a truth that our immortal self is included in the 
being of the Christ, the universal spirit, and the manifested 
God, and is already saved and was never lost or diseased, 
why is it that we are ever sick? It is simply because we are 
blind to that truth of faith, in consequence of the soul's im- 
mersion in the life of sense. It is hidden from the percep- 
tion of the psychical man. The earth turns on its axis once 
a day ; yet, if our judgment were governed wholly by our 



152 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

sense-perceptions, it would not be to us a reality, any more 
than it is to animals. To such a man it is an unknown 
truth, and it is the same to him as if it were not. So until 
the supreme truth that our inmost being and real self is in 
the Christ, and the Christ in us is the real self, is appre- 
hended by thought, and we attain to a certitude of belief of 
it, it is not to us a conscious reality. An unrecognized truth 
has no influence over us. We are saved by the knowledge 
of the truth. Millions of people are born and pass through 
their earthly existence, eat, drink, toil, sleep, and die, with 
no thought of their celestial and undying self. The} 7 think 
downward, and never once look up. To change all this is 
the aim of the phrenopathic physician. 

To modify a patient's thinking in regard to himself and his 
disease, we employ the principle of suggestion or positive 
affirmation — not mental argument, as it is sometimes called, 
for argument creates doubt and reaction. No sick man was 
ever cured by reasoning with him, mentally or verbally. It 
is the business of the man who knows the truth, not to argue, 
but to affirm. The spiritual man judgeth all things, but is 
himself judged by no one. (1 Cor. ii : 15.) If he is endued 
with power from on high, he will possess the ability to fasten 
saving, healing impressions upon the minds of men. The 
influence of suggestion and positive affirmation upon a per- 
son in the hypnotic state borders upon the miraculous, 
and is attracting deserved attention among physiologists in 
Europe, and has ever since Professor Heidenhain called the 
attention of scientific men to it. In France, at Nancy, M. 
Focachon was able by his will, expressed in the form of sug- 
gestion, to modify the action of the vital organs of his sub- 
ject, and actually caused a blister to form on her back. But 
the effect of suggestion is the result of the faith of the sub- 
ject, for it is always proportioned to the degree in which the 
patient believes what you say. If the patient is predisposed 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 153 

to believe you, the magnetic state is not necessary to the 
influence of your affirmations upon him. If he is not thus 
disposed, we employ silent or mental suggestion, and often- 
times with marvellous effect. 

In accordance with the law of thought-transference, and 
acting on the principle that ideas operate as causes, we form 
in our minds the idea of the change to be effected in the 
patient in order to the cure of his disease. We have only 
space for a few illustrations. In dropsy there is a suspended 
or defective action of the kidneys and sometimes of the skin. 
A cure cannot be effected by any therapeutic agent without 
a restoration of the kidneys to their normal functional 
action. In rheumatism there is also a defective action of the 
renal functions. Certain acids, as the lactic, the uric, and 
lithic acids, are retained in the blood instead of being elimi- 
nated from it by the kidneys. In some cases of disease an 
increased or diminished action of the perspiratory glands of 
the skin is indicated as necessary, or an increased activity of 
some one or all of the excreting organs. Whatever the 
physiological change is which is demanded, the universal life- 
principle, which we call nature, is making an effort to effect 
it, and we may augment her curative endeavor by forming in 
our minds the idea of the change. Here knowledge is power, 
and we find medical science an auxiliary to the mental sys- 
tem of cure. And we would take occasion to remark, that 
no intelligent practitioner of the mind-cure will ignore wholly 
all medical science. Mind is the only active principle in the 
universe. The mind of a skillful surgeon performs marvels 
In saving the lives of people. 

The phrenopathic system is not necessarily antagonistic to 
other methods of cure, as the various hygienic regulations, 
and even the use of the harmless specific remedies. Through 
various agencies the mind may act on the body. From ultra- 
isms and hobbies of all kinds phrenopathy should be kept 



154 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

clear. If you give a harmless specific medicine, or a bread 
pill, or employ the dilutions and triturations of homoeopathy, 
the patient forms in his mind the idea of a certain change in 
the action of the subtle life forces, and you do the same, and 
in many cases there is no rational objection to such a course 
any more than there is to the food we eat and the water we 
drink, provided always that the remedy is innoxious. He 
that is not against us is for us, even though he follow not 
with us. (Luke ix : 49, 50.) The best way of getting from 
place to place is to walk, for according to correspondence, to 
walk signifies to live. But if we cannot walk, other modes 
of locomotion are not to be discarded, such as coaches, horse- 
cars, and railroads. If a man cannot walk by faith, let him 
have a carriage, or at least a cane or a crutch. Until we be- 
come spiritual enough to glide through space like the gods of 
Homer, we shall have occasion to use other and slower means 
of getting about. 

A very essential qualification for the practice of the mental- 
cure system, is the power of mental abstraction, the ability 
to fix our thought upon one thing and to banish all other 
things from the mind. This state of mental concentration 
was called in the Hindu metaphysics Ekdgrdta, that is, one- 
pointedness. The attainment of that power was considered 
as an indipensable condition of all philosophical speculation 
and religious development. In order to attain to this ab- 
straction from external things, and concentration of thought, 
they repeated the holy syllable Om, a contraction of 
A. U. M., the initials of the Hindu trinity, Aditi, Viradj 
(the Vis a U"), and Maia, answering to the Father, Son, and 
Hoty Spirit in the Christian system. The faculty of mental 
abstraction, and the ability to concentrate the mind upon one 
thing, is a natural endowment, but can be cultivated by prac- 
tice. 

In order to a successful practice of the mental-cure sys- 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 155 

tem, it is not necessary to deny the personality of God as 
some have done, and reduce him to an inconceivable sea of 
being, an ocean of spirit without bottom or shore. This is 
applying to the Divine Being that which can be predicated 
only of matter, — the quality or property of extension. Such 
a God would be to us no God. Personality consists in Love 
and Wisdom, as there is no abstract impersonal love or un- 
derstanding. The infinity and immensity of God are not 
boundless space, but the negation of space — absolute free- 
dom from the limitations of space. So the eternity of God 
is not endless time, but the denial of time. We are to elimi- 
nate from our conception of the Deity all ideas of time and 
space. 

Neither is it necessary to deny the personality and persist- 
ent individuality of the human spirit. Personality is not 
predicable of the body, for, as we have shown, the corporeal 
organism is not man. The mind, or thinking principle, is the 
man. The feeling that "I am I" is as immortal as the 
Deity, for it is the perpetual gift of God, and we cannot 
divest ourselves of that consciousness without annihilation. 
" The gift of God is eternal life," and he gives life to man 
so fully that it must ever seem as his own. Even the Bud- 
dhist Nirvana is not the annihilation of self, but the destruc- 
tion of selfishness. Those who attain to it have no desire 
of separate possessions, but only of that which belongs to all 
pure souls alike, — like the atmosphere we breathe. In the 
Christian heaven, what all possess belongs to each, and the 
good and truth of each is freely imparted to all. Yet heaven 
is not a countless number of individuals reduced in a crucible 
to a molten sea of being. The selfhood is not lost in God- 
hood, but the true self, the undiseased and undying spiritual 
entity, is found included in the Christ, who is the manifested 
God. To believe this of myself will save me. for it is the 
highest state and act of faith. To steadfastly believe it of 



156 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

another, who has not consciously climbed up to this summit 
of spiritual intelligence, will tend to save (or heal) that other. 
For when we are ourselves lifted up, we may draw all men 
unto us. The cessation of our distinct (not separate) indi- 
viduality would be equivalent to our annihilation. 

It is not necessary to deny the existence of matter, but 
only to affirm the sovereignty of mind over it. Matter exists 
as a mode of consciousness in us, and is as real as that mode 
of thought. So disease exists as a wrong way of think- 
ing, and to change that way of thinking for the belief 
of the truth, is to cure the disease, of whatever nature 
it is. It is not necessaiy to tell a man, dying of con- 
sumption, that he is not sick, for that is not true. If he is 
not sick, why try to cure him? We would only affirm, and if 
possible, cause him to perceive, that the deepest reality of 
the disease is not physical, but mental. By^ a fall on an icy 
sidewalk a man may break his arm or his leg. We would 
not cure him by denying the fact of his existence or of the 
sidewalk, for there is no saving virtue in what is false. But 
recognizing both the fall and the fracture, we would affirm 
that the immortal man is not injured, and that no sooner was 
the wound made than an everywhere-present Divine Life goes 
to work to heal the hurt. We would steadfastly believe 
this, and form in our mind the idea of the change to be 
effected in order to a cure, and aid nature by accelerating the 
curative process. 

As to the use of the hands, we must be guided by our 
instincts and intuitions when and how to use them. The 
apostles, by the imposition of the hands, imparted the Holy 
Spirit, the Universal Life-Principle, and no good reason can 
be given why it may not be done to-day. As has been well 
said by my friend, Professor Butts " Jesus often laid hands 
on the sick and healed them. But it was not the hand that 
healed. It was the moral goodness that was resident in the 
soul. So far as hands were concerned, everybody in Judea 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 157 

had them; but not everybody had the divine wisdom whigh 
constitutes spiritual magnetism." {Hints on Metaphysics, 
p. 45.) 

In closing the discussion of the subject of Mental Thera- 
peutics in this chapter, we would say in the language of 
Paul, "There is one God, and one Mediator between God 
and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. ii : 5.) Through 
Jesus we may have communication with the Father, the 
Supreme and Eternal Goodness^ the to ayaOov of Plato, the 
Summum Bonum, or highest good. He is the door through 
which we enter in, the inward Teacher, the way, the truth, 
and the life. A sympathetic or psychometric conjunction 
with him places us in a receptive relation to the manifested 
God and the spiritual realm of being. He came to earth 
from that region of existence, and in returning left the gates 
open along the upward and shining way, and heaven has 
been pouring itself into earth ever since. By connecting 
ourselves with Jesus, we become "joint heirs" with him of 
all the Father has to give to men. For he says to the 
Father, "all mine are thine, and thine are mine." (John 
xvii : 10.) Through him we come into a fellowship (kouWci, 
conscious community of life, the state of having all things 
in common) with God, and the blood of Christ, or the light 
of the Supreme Truth, cleanses us from all sin, — from all 
false beliefs and the errors of life to which they lead. 
(1 John i: 7-9.) If there is auy higher system of mental 
cure than this, we have never learned it. It is a way of sal- 
vation from sin and disease which will stand the test of 
experiment. " For we have not followed cunningly devised 
fables when we made known unto you the power and coming 
of our Lord Jesus Christ." (2 Peter i: 16.) If we give 
ourselves to him, he will give us back to God, and we shall 
receive in return the Divine Life and Supreme Good. 



158 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE KEYS OP THE KINGDOM OP THE HEAVENS, OR THE POWER 
TO DELIVER OURSELVES AND OTHERS FROM THE BONDAGE 

OF THE SENSES. 

That degree of our mental being which may be charac- 
terized as the life of sense, and which is the opposite of the 
life of the Spirit, is denominated b} T Paul the psychical mind 
or man, improperly translated in our common version of the 
New Testament, the natural man. It is the aim of Chris- 
tianity, as it has ever been of all spiritual religions, to 
elevate man from this lower plane of thought, which is the 
seat of all our sin and disease, to the spiritual condition, 
which is life and peace. In the system of Buddhism, which 
was once a truly spiritual religion before it became degraded 
into an external mechanism of rites and ceremonies, the 
external sense-life is denominated Maliat or Prakriti. The 
birth into the spiritual life is called Moksha and Nirvana, 
and is that of which Jesus speaks, as entering into the king- 
dom of the heavens, or the kingdom of Gocl, a condition of 
spiritual development, or education, that is attainable on 
earth, and not to be taught, as is usually done, as belonging 
exclusively to a future state. It is such a state of union 
with God that the man becomes a part of the grand whole, 
— the pleroma or fulness of being (Eph. iii : 19), — a state 
where the Divine and Celestial in man come to dominion and 
reign. But the man is never so absorbed and merged into 
the Divine Essence as to lose his individuality. Even 
Nirvana is attainable on earth. The Buddha is represented 
as teaching that " those who are free from all worldly 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 159 

desires enter Nirvana." {Precepts of the Bhammapada, 
v. 126.) In this state man lives spiritually, and is freed 
from the bondage of the senses and the controlling influence 
of their illusions. It is a difficult task to convince an invalid 
that all his sense-perceptions are a deceptive appearance, 
and are never to form the basis of his judgment as to his 
real condition. But how often do we have to correct the 
fallacious testimony of our senses. In a winter's day. with 
the mercury far below the freezing-point, the water of the 
ocean feels colder to the hand than the air, but it is several 
degrees warmer. A man in a chill may feel cold when he is 
five degrees above the normal temperature of the human 
body. When he is suffering from the heat on a summer's 
day, if you test him by the thermometer, he may be below 
the natural temperature of the bocty. Judging from the 
testimony of the senses, who would suppose that the earth 
was a sphere instead of an extended plain? That the 
planets and fixed stars are worlds, and some of them much 
larger than the earth? That light, color, and sound are 
nothing external, but are modifications of mind or states of 
consciousness which are called sensations. A man on the 
equator is moving through space, with the revolution of the 
earth on its axis, at the rate of a thousand miles au hour, 
yet he has no evidence of it from his senses. He seems to 
himself to be at rest, which, like all our sense-perceptions, 
is the opposite of the truth. Real knowledge begins where 
sensation ends. All genuine science consists in correcting 
the illusive testimony of our senses. It is the object of 
mental and spiritual science to raise us out of the dominion 
of the senses into the light of real truth, or what Kant 
denominates the pure reason. When a straight stick, as a 
rosewood cane, is immersed obliquely in water for half its 
length, it appears to be bent. Our sense of sight testifies to 
this as positively as it does to anything. But it is not bent ; 



160 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

it is an illusion, a false appearance, an aberration from the 
truth in the judgment of the psychical man or mind. When 
we stand on the beach and watch the water of the ocean 
after a storm, the waves seem to rush in upon the land, and 
ninety-nine persons out of a hundred will affirm this. But 
they do not. There is only a successive elevation of the 
water from beneath. If we throw in a stick, it is not 
washed in upon the land. It only rises up, and is left where 
it was before. 

But we shall be asked, Is it possible for us to correct 
these deceptive appearances so that they will appear to us 
otherwise, and in accordance with the truth? It is possible 
and eas} T . When we know that the waves are not rushing 
in upon the land, they no longer seem to do so. To the 
astronomer the earth does not seem a level plain. He does 
not form in his mind that conception or idea of it. So a 
man may come under the fixed influence of the illusion that 
he is sick ; but he is not. The real man is not diseased, any 
more than our rosewood cane is bent b}' being immersed in 
water. He has only come to think himself sick ; but it is a 
deflection or aberration from the truth. He judges accord- 
ing to the sensuous appearance, which is contrary to the 
precept of Christianity and to the life of faith. The belief 
that we are sick is not a " righteous judgment." It is not a 
divine rectitude of thought, but the judgment is warped. But 
can a man on a sick-bed make it appear to himself that he is 
not diseased? We can only answer by saying that it is 
possible. We do not say that it is always an easy matter 
to do it. We only affirm its possibility. When he has 
come to the knowledge of the real self, the immortal and 
undying Ego, the unchanging I Am, and views that as his 
true being, then he knows that he is not diseased, and the 
disease as the creation of a false judgment disappears. A 
few mornings ago, during a cold- wave which swept over 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 161 

New England, a friend of ours started to walk to the sta- 
tion, a distance of half a mile. The air was perfectly still, 
the rising sou was shining brightly in an unclouded sky, and 
the man with no extra protection was not aware of the 
extreme cold. But he met a neighbor who informed him 
that the mercury was twenty-four degrees below zero. 
After this he was nearly frozen before he reached his office. 
If he had continued in the blissful ignorance with which he 
started out on his walk, he would have suffered less. The 
cold is not measured by the thermometer, but is a sensa- 
tional state in us. We do not wish to be understood as 
affirming that if all men should agree to think and believe 
that it was warm, it would make it so. Such a universal 
belief would not melt snow and ice, nor affect the mercury 
in the bulb of the thermometer. But our belief affects our 
sensational life. The man who has never found out that 
he is sick, is well. Much of what passes current iu the 
world for medical science is well calculated to give to people 
this hurtful knowledge, and many diseases arise from it. It 
teaches men how to believe themselves sick, how to find out 
in the most scientific manner that they have a particular 
malady. It sets them on the hunt for symptoms of disease, 
and they are quite sure to find them. But the mental 
science of health and disease instructs men how to find out 
that they are not sick, which is the best of all remedies. 
The poet Churchill, who was an educated physician, gives us 
a good prescription for most nervous invalids : — 

"The surest road to health, say what they- will, 

Is never to suppose we shall be ill ; 
Most of the evils we poor mortals know, 

From doctors and imagination flow." 

This, though not in the highest strain of poetry, contains 
some grains of truth, enough for an initial dose in mental 
medicine. But how r can an invalid rise above his illusions? 



162 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

To be affected by disease is, in the expressive language of 
the New Testament, to be bound. (Luke xiii : 16.) How 
can we be loosed from our infirmities? How can we 
straighten our rosewood cane that seems bent in the water? 
Only by looking at it from a higher plane of the mind. We 
can break the fetters of illusion only by faith. There is a 
faith of which Jesus and the apostles speak, which is not 
a borrowed opinion, but a higher knowledge of truth, a state 
of spiritual perception, an inward divine illumination and 
intuitive belief, and this celestial knowledge is the power of 
God and the wisdom of God unto salvation for both soul and 
body. ' Through the silent sphere of our life, the unseen in- 
fluence of our minds, combined with instruction, a patient 
may be raised to this more elevated plane of thought. } In 
the other life, says Swedenborg, — by which he can only 
mean the realm of mind, — all thoughts are communicated to 
those around. (Heaven and Hell, 325.) The more deeply 
we are grounded in the celestial degree of life, the more 
powerfully will our minds and thoughts affect others. The 
Christian law of life is well expressed by Paul, "We that 
are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." (Eom. 
xv : 1.) The idea in the original is, not merely to bear with, 
to endure, but to take away, to remove the infirmities of our 
weak neighbor. The original Greek word is the same as in 
the passage where it is said of Jesus, " Himself took up our 
infirmities and bare away our diseases." (Matt, viii : 17.) 
We are to take away the idea and fallacious belief of disease, 
and give to the patient, in its stead, the idea of recovery and 
of health. This we shall be able to do only after we have 
obtained the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which invests 
the Christian hierareh with the power of binding and loosing. 
On a certain occasion, when Jesus was in the region of 
Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples or scholars, Who 
do men say that the son of man is? In harmony with the 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 163 

wide-spread and ancient belief in the reincarnation of souls, 
some thought him to be Elijah, or Jeremiah, or some other 
of the greater Jewish prophets. The question being put to 
Peter, he replied, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
Living God, the El Chat, the Mighty Living One." This 
was revealed to Peter by our Father in the heavens, and not 
by flesh and blood, or the lower animal soul. It was an in- 
ward illumination from the light of the supreme and universal 
Spirit. And on this truth, as on a rock of ages, that the 
inmost spirit of man is the son and perpetual offspring of the 
living God, and that the life of the spirit is the only true and 
enduring life, and that all other life is an ever-changing and 
evanescent illusion, the Christ affirms that that state of man 
which is called the church, and which is heaven on earth and 
in man, shall be built, and the gates of Hades, or the power 
and influence of undeveloped souls, the astral realm of being, 
shall not prevail against it. To such a one the keys of the 
kingdom of heaven are committed. In the divine science of 
correspondence a key signifies the power of spiritual truth, 
a living faith, which can free men's souls from the dominion 
of Hades, or the fetters of sense. It is the recognition of 
ourselves and others as sons and daughters of God. and the 
inward Christ as our true and immortal being. Disease and 
sin, which belong to Hades, or the astral region in man, the 
plane of the animal soul and the external senses, cannot 
invade this divine centre of our existence. Even death itself 
stops short and turns back on approaching the confines of 
our true being, unable to approach nearer to its quenchless 
light of truth. If disease comes forth to attack the outposts 
of our existence, we may be sure it can never storm the 
citadel of life in us. From this celestial altitude of our 
being, the Christ realm of human nature, the summit and 
crown of life, we may go forth to meet the enemy aud turn 
him back into Hades, and with the key of the house of 



1G4 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

David, may lock the door after him ; for what we bind on 
earth shall be bound in the heavens ; and what we loose on 
earth (or set at liberty from sin and disease) shall be loosed 
in the heavens. (Matt, xvi : 13-20.) For such a man acts 
in and from the ever-present heavens, or the celestial plane 
of his being. 

This will lead us to consider the relation of the internal to 
the external in nature and in man, and to a discussion of the 
question, Is it possible for one mind so to influence another 
mind as to chauge his bodily condition from disease to 
health? 

It was the doctrine of Bishop Berkeley that all the objects 
of nature of which we take cognizance by our sense-percep- 
tions, are in their inmost reality only ideas in the mind. 
This was also the teaching of Plato, and is a fundamental 
tenet of the idealistic philosophy. All external things rep- 
resent and express things in the mind. These ideas of 
things were supposed by Berkeley to be imprinted on our 
minds by the infinite Spirit in whom we live, and are moved, 
and have our being. He says: "The ideas imprinted on 
the senses by the Author of nature, are called real things ; 
and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, 
and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of 
things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensa- 
tions, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless 
ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived b} 7 it, 
as truly as the ideas of its own forming. The ideas of sense 
are allowed to have more realitj* in them, that is, to be more 
strong, orderly, and coherent, than the creatures of the 
mind ; but this is no argument that they exist without the 
mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or think- 
ing substance that perceives them, in that they are excited 
by the will of another and more powerful Spirit ; yet still 
they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, 



A.ND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 165 

can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it." (Treatise 
concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 30.) 

Thus, what we call an external world is perpetually created 
in our minds, and is but the external or sensuous expression 
of ideas which we derive from the Infinite Mind. It is the 
projecting outward into the conditions of space and time of 
subjective conceptions. The science of the correspondence 
of external to internal things becomes an exact science, like 
geometry, when we learn the spiritual meaning of the objects 
of nature, or come to understand what idea or state of the 
mind each thing represents, and from which it arises into 
existence in us. What is true of the world at large is also 
true of the human body in its relation to the mind. Man, 
as the ancient sages taught, is a microcosm, and comprises 
in himself all that appears to be without. He is an epitome 
of the universe, as each drop is of the ocean. As in exhibi- 
tions of the stereopticon the images which appear upon the 
screen are only representations of things in the camera, so 
the external world, including the human body, is only a pro- 
jection and shadow of an internal and real world. The inner 
is the substantial, the outer is the phenomenal. Change the 
internal picture or idea in the mind, as in the stereoptical 
camera, and you necessitate a modification of the external 
representation. If the mental image is that of disease or 
sorrow, if this is thrown upon the material and corporeal 
screen, it becomes a magnified representation of it in the 
body. Change this for the illuminated and transparent pic- 
ture (or idea) of health and happiness, and it is projected 
into a physical expression. The without is always as the 
within, and the twain are one like cause and effect. 

Admitting this theoiy of creation to be true — and it is 
inherently and intuitively rational — the inquiry arises, Can 
one finite mind excite in another mind ideas that shall have 
all the vividness of realitv? 



166 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

mitigated sense, a creative potentiality? Can it cause the 
appearance and the disappearance of the objects of sense? 
Professor Zollner, of the University of Leipzig, admits that 
such a thing is possible, and introduces the fact to explain 
certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena witnessed in his 
experiments with Slade, such as the disappearance and sub- 
sequent reappearance of a table from the room. It was the 
evanescence from the mind, and the return to the mind of 
the idea of the table. When Jesus vanished from the sight 
of men, as he sometimes did, — which is also said to have 
been done by Apollonius of Tyana, — it was only the obliter- 
ation of his idea from men's minds. Is it possible thus to 
cause the evanescence of the thought and sensational image 
of disease from the mind of a patient? And can we create 
in him so vivid an idea of health, or of a certain bodily con- 
dition, that it shall be to him an absolute reality and actu- 
ality? We unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative. It has 
been done, and consequently can be done again. In the lan- 
guage of another, "That which we have heard, that which 
we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our 
hands handled, concerning the Word of life, declare we unto 
you." (1 Johni: 1-3.) 

Says Professor Zollner: "We know from internal expe- 
rience that our will is able up to a certain degree, by means 
of the so-called force of the imagination, to produce at 
pleasure representations of objects of sight in our own soul. 
In this case we recognize our own will as the cause of the 
representations. If, now, experiments could be instituted, 
in which this individual will (or imagination) of one man 
could produce in like manner, at pleasure, representative 
images in the soul of another, spatially separated from the 
willing agent, these images being clothed with all the attri- 
butes of reality which we ascribe to the so-called real or 
actual world surrounding us, thereby would experimental 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 167 

proof be afforded that the phenomenon of a real, external 
world can be produced and evoked by an individual will, 
joined with intelligence, in another individual. 

"There remains only the question whether it is experi- 
mentally demonstrable that the human will (or imagination) 
is able to induce such vivid representations in the conscious- 
ness of another, that the latter regards them altogether as 
he regards the representations whose causes we ordinarily 
designate as real objects or bodies. Experiments of this kind 
have, in fact, been publicly instituted in Germany by the 
magnetizer, Hansen, of such a surprising and convincing 
nature that it is impossible to doubt the reality of the influ- 
ence of an individual will upon another individual." (Tran- 
scendental Physics, pp. 150, 151.) 

Experiments have also been made in France recently by 
M. Focachon, which conclusively prove the influence of one 
mind upon another mind, and through this medium upon the 
body, in the generation and cure of diseased conditions. 
Intelligent men and women in every part of the world are 
becoming aroused to the study of the occult powers of the 
human spirit, and to the investigation of the latent energies 
of the mind of man. The religious metaphysical philosophy 
of the East is becoming united to the practical science of 
Europe and America, and a higher development of man will 
be the result. The dormant, slumbering energies of the 
human soul will be awakened again into life and activity. 
A dead Christianity, which is only the petrifaction of the 
primitive svstem, and a still more defunct Buddhism, will be 
resuscitated and resume their youthful vigor. What are now 
accounted marvels of healing will become only ordinary 
events, like the morning succeeding the night, and spring 
following winter in regular succession. 

If ideas are the inmost essence and reality of what we call 
external things, and God creates the world and all it con- 



1G8 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

tains of beauty and grandeur, by imprinting upon our minds 
the ideas of things, it is not an unreasonable supposition that 
man, who is made in the image and likeness of God, under 
certain conditions and limitations, may have a creative power 
and influence over the mind of another. The world exists 
subjectively, or in mind, before it is an objective reality. 
The same is true of the body of man. Why should it be 
thought a thing incredible that our influence over the mind 
of a passive subject may be sufficient to affect his bodily 
condition. The world is to us what we make it, and so is 
our physical organism. Our ideas and thoughts may be so 
transferred to the mind of a patient as to become hi9 own. 
In the modern science of medicine, the blood of a healthy 
person is sometimes transferred to the veins of an invalid. 
But a transfusion of our mental life into another is a 
thousand times better. This is the divine method, and 
is what Jesus did. ■ The injunction of Paul has here a 
special application, "Be ye imitators of God, as beloved 
children." (Eph. v:l.) These old and forgotten truths 
will again be re-established and as conclusively proved as are 
any of the principles of chemistry, and out of them will 
arise the divinest and most efficient system of healing the 
souls and bodies of men the world has ever seen. In the 
principle we have illustrated above, we are getting down to 
the bottom fact and underlying reality in the cures effected by 
Jesus the Christ. He had power to vanish from the sight of 
men, by expunging from their minds the sensational image of 
himself, and he possessed the ability to obliterate from the 
minds of the sick the idea of their malady, and to imprint 
upon their receptive souls the idea of health and wholeness. 
During the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since his 
material manifestation he has lost none of his power to 
save (or heal) . For in the realm of spirit, into which his 
living consciousness has been translated, he is " the same 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 169 

yesterday, to-day, and forever." What he ever accom- 
plished, he can do now, and can so impart his life as the 
risen and ascended Christ to men, that the}" may do the 
same. In the lapse of humanity in its organic unity (which 
is called Adam) from the high table-land of the spiritual 
and celestial into the sensuous and fleshly range of the mind, 
the deific powers of human nature became dormant ; but 
they are not dead. Man in the descending scale of life has 
touched the bottom, and is rebounding upward. In the 
restoration of the spiritual life of humanity will come back 
the power " to work the works of God." When we come to 
view man, not as a material body, but as a " living soul," 
which is never sundered from the Infinite Mind, we shall 
recover our lost dominion over the works of God, especially 
our own body. 

The fundamental principle in the practice of the phrenopa- 
thic method of cure is the recognition of the true idea of 
man as already in his true being an immortal spirit, and as 
such, exempt from sin and disease. In our conception of 
the patient we divest him of the material and astral envelope, 
and think of him not as about to be saved in some future 
time, but as already saved, so far as his true being is con- 
cerned. We, as it were, dematerialize him in our idea of 
him. Through the influence of mind upon mind, and in 
accordance with the law of thought-transference, this serves 
to dispossess him of the idea and belief of disease, and free 
him from his engrossment by the illusions of sense. It may 
be objected to such a method of mental cure, that it is too 
transcendental, and but a few are sufficiently unfolded spirit- 
ually to practise it with any degree of success. In reply we 
would only say that the intelligent force which creates and 
governs the world is transcendental ; that is, it is purely 
mental and is beyond the grasp of the senses, but is none 
the less real and potential for all that. It is quite true that 



170 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

only a comparatively small number of persons are at present 
qualified to practice the system with marked success. But 
it has been our aim to educate men and women up to that 
degree of spiritual development that will greatly increase the 
number of successful practitioners. It may, in truth, be said 
of surgery, that only a small fraction of the twelve hundred 
millions of the human race are qualified to be eminently 
skillful surgeons. Yet that is no weighty objection to the 
modern science of surgery which is accomplishing such 
marvels in saving life. The good surgeon, like the poet, is 
born, not made. The same is true of the phrenopathic 
healer. 

The system of cure that has been advocated and its prin- 
ciples expounded in these pages, and in the volumes which 
have preceded this, is fundamentally at variance with the 
dominant scientific materialism of the day. It has been the 
fashion for some centuries to believe and teach that it is 
the body ivhicJi makes the mind ; that the soul is a function 
of the organism, or of some part of it, as, for instance, the 
brain, and is entirely dependent upon and governed by the 
organism. This is coming to be viewed by many as a total 
inversion of the truth, as a monstrous perversion of the true 
idea of man, and a degrading doctrine against which there is 
a manifest reaction and revolt in the public mind. In every 
age of human history, and in all nationalities, there have 
been philosophers who have held that the soul makes and 
governs the body. But in our European and Western civil- 
izations, owing to the prevalence of materialism, the teaching 
of such men has been a voice crying in the wilderness, with 
few to hear. 'The idealists, who have ever constituted the 
more spiritual portion of mankind, affirm that the external 
form and condition of man are dependent upon his internal 
state ; that it is the nature of mind, or spirit, to ultimate 
itself in a bodily expression in harmony with it. The 



AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 171 

habitual indulgence of certain evil passions alters the con- 
formation of the face and the whole body, and the man, 
in accordance with a divine law, becomes externally what he 
is internally, so far as such a change can be effected in one 
brief life on earth. The man who yields to the indulgence 
of the animal and selfish appetites and propensities, begins 
to look animal and selfish. The habitual belief of those false 
and illusive ideas which constitute mental disease, those 
opinions which prevail in the world, which become a promi- 
nent part of our education, but which are without foundation 
in truth, will sooner or later ultimate themselves in physical 
maladies. For it is an established law of divine order that 
a man must inevitably in time become outwardly what he is 
inwardly, and in this life physically what he is mentally. 
Our system of mental cure recognizes and emphasizes this 
universal principle. AYe seek in harmony with it to com- 
mence the cure of disease from within, to inaugurate a 
change in the mental status of a patient, which must with 
undeviating certainty translate itself into a corporeal expres- 
sion. TTe aim to prepare the man, not only for the life that 
is. but also for all the life which is to come. It is a promi- 
nent intent of the current religious instruction of the day to 
prepare men to die. That string has been harped upon 
until it is well-nigh worn out. The philosophy which we 
advocate aims to prepare men never to die, to view death as 
an illusion, and to lead the disciple to the attainment of that 
knowledge of God, and our relation to him, which is eternal 
life. TTe enter the sick-room, not to confer upon the patient 
the useless sacrament of extreme unction to fit him to die, 
and to smooth his passage into purgatory, but to light in the 
consciousness of the sufferer the quenchless torch of a present 
immortality, and faith in a present and full salvation, and to 
close the gates of Hades against his ingress into its dark 
domains. All the virtues of life and truths of faith, which 



172 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY 

are the formative principles of a celestial and angelic char- 
acter, are recommended. As one has well said, " A man of 
pure and angelic character begins inevitably to present a 
pure and angelic appearance ; the countenance becomes 
placid, the manner sedate ; and the soul of man transforms 
his body until it becomes as angelic as is compatible with its 
present relations : and when it assumes a new form after 
what is called deaths what shall prevent it from assuming the 
one most appropriate to its nature? " {The Blazing /Star, by 
William B. Green, p. 166.) 

It has been our aim, in what we have said in this volume, 
to restore Christianity to something of its original meaning 
in the religious consciousness of men ; to winnow away the 
accumulated and useless chaff, and preserve the divine and 
living seed ; to divest it of all that is non-essential to it, and 
which can only be viewed by the enlightened minds of to-day 
as a subsequent disfiguring addition to the primitive system. 
We have endeavored to transport our mind back through the 
centuries and come face to face with the incarnated Christ, 
and reverently listen to the words of him who spake as never 
man before spake. In giving an esoteric, or inside, view 
of Christianity as a sj^stem of saving and healing truth, we 
have, of course, failed to do full justice to the subject. No 
artist ever yet succeeded in painting the rainbow that spans 
the eastern heavens after a storm. He only does the best he 
can, and we add to what he does his evident good intention, 
and accept the picture as an aid to recalling in our own 
minds the true and perfect idea of the bow of promise which 
God has placed upon the clouds. Christianity is inseparable 
from the living personality of Jesus the Christ. None but 
he can fully expound it and reveal it. If our attempt to do 
so shall bring an} T one to sit at his feet and listen to him as 
he still inly speaks to men, we shall not have written in 
vain. The system of mental healing must ever be kept 




AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 173 

within the domain of a genuine Christianity. Outside 
of the system of truth taught the world *by Jesus, it will 
be as powerless to save as was the staff of Elijah, 
separated from the hands of the prophet and in the 
grasp of his servant, to raise to life the dead son 
of the Shunamite woman. The fundamental idea of 
Christianity as a system of salvation, as also of the mental- 
cure system of to-day, is that the Christ is the supreme 
living principle, and the Christ-life in us is the only real and 
immortal life. All other life is mutable and evanescent. 
He is a Christian in the full-orbed meaning of that word in 
whom there is a reincarnation of the intellectual and moral 
life of Jesus. " He who lives the life shall know of the 
doctrine." It is only by doing the truth that it becomes so 
incorporated into our inner being as to become a part of our 
living self. Then it is not an external garment to be put on 
and off as occasion may require, but u the life of God in the 
soul of man." The inner self, when it is composed of 
the truths of faith, as the external body is of the elements 
of the world, is as immortal as are those truths. The 
fully instructed soul is but the formulation into a living 
personality of God's truth. " Mark the perfect man (the 
fully initiated) and behold the upright (the spiritually 
enlightened), for the end of that man is peace," which is the 
opposite of mental disease. (Ps. xxxvii : 37.) He in whom 
the Christ dwells and acts is invested with the silent omnipo- 
tence of truth, and will be a saving power in the age in which 
he lives. Jn all such as have fellowship (or community of 
life) with Jesus he multiplies and spiritually propagates him- 
self, and the Christ, as the manifested God, becomes more and 
more incarnated in humanity. In the language of the leader 
of the Brahmo Somaj, or Church of God, in India, "The 
Spirit-Christ spreads thus forth in the universe as an emana- 
tion from the Divine Reason, and you can see him with the 
eye of faith underlying all the endless varieties of truth and 



171 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 

goodness in ancient and modern times. He is the Christ as 
the principle of pure spiritual intelligence, the Word of God, 
mighty Logos. Scattered in all men and women of the East 
and the West are multitudinous Christ-principles and 
fragments of Christ-life, one vast and identical Sonship 
diversely manifested." It is olir sincere prayer that the 
mental-cure movement, now growing into such proportions 
in Europe and America, may be a tributary stream to swell 
the vast current of the Christ-life in the world, until the 
earth shall be full of the saving knowledge of God as the 
waters cover the deep. 

CONQUER AND REST. 

^ "Why not learn to conquer sorrow? 

Why not learn to smile at pain? 

Why should every stormy morrow 

Shroud our way in gloom again? 

" Why not lift the soul immortal 
Up to its angelic height — 
Bid it pass the radiant portal 
Of the world of faith and light? 

" Oh ! there is another "being 
All about us, all above, 
Hid from mortal sense or seeing, 
Save the nameless sense of love. 

" Not the love that dies like roses, 

When the frost-fire scathes the sod, 
But the eternal rest that closes 
Round the soul that dwells in God. 

"Into this great habitation 
Never tear or sorrow came; 
Oh ! it is the hew creation, 

God its light, and love its flame. 

" Up, soul ! and dwell forever 
On this hidden, glorious shore ; 
Chilled by cloud-shade, never, never; 
Up, and dwell for evermore." 



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